Essays on individuality

I

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ESSAYS ON INDIVIDUALITY

JOHN DOS PASSOS
RICHARD M. WEAVER
HELMUT SCHOECK
JAMES C. MALIN
FRIEDRICH A. HAYEK
JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

CONWAY ZIRKLE
FELIX MORLEY
ROGER J. WILLIAMS
MILTON FRIEDMAN
ARTHUR A. EKIRCH, JR.
WILLIAM M. McGOVERN

ESSAYS ON
INDIVIDUALITY

edited by

Felix Morley

Philadelphia
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

(c) 1958 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania

Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan
by the Oxford University Press
London, Bombay, and Karachi

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 58-6941

Printed in the United States of America
American Book-Stratford Press, Inc., New York

INTRODUCTION

THE TWELVE ESSAYS COMPOSING THIS VOLUME WERE ORIGINALLY

prepared for a "Symposium on Individuality and Personality"
held at the Princeton Inn, Princeton, New Jersey, September
12 to 18, 1956. Most of them have been somewhat revised
by the authors, in the light of the symposium discussions, and
are now submitted to public consideration as a comprehensive
survey of this vital and timely subject.

This symposium was sponsored by The Foundation for
American Studies, which in a preliminary announcement
noted that since the close of World War II "an increasing
number of scholars have turned their attention to the prob-
lem of man's freedom in the face of modern society's seem-
ingly irresistible urge to socialize and regiment the thought
and action of the individual." It was to give close analysis to
the far-reaching implications of this trend that the Founda-
tion gathered together, for free and untrammeled discussion,
a group of men "whose writings have shown a particular aware-
ness of the . . . challenge to . . . individual privacy, responsi-
bility, and self-determination. . . ."

The only instruction given to those whose contributions
follow was that each should "approach the topic of the sym-

5

6 Introduction

posium from the vantage point of his own specialty." Since
the participants had been intentionally selected from various
professional fields, uniformity of approach was neither de-
sired, expected nor attained. In the group were specialists in
two branches of natural science, in economics, history, litera-
ture, philosophy, politics, rhetoric, and sociology. Yet, as the
reader will see for himself, the area of fundamental agreement
proved itself much more extensive, and much more positive,
than the occasional differences of opinion, sharp though
these sometimes were.

None of the essays printed in this volume were read at the
symposium. They nevertheless clearly reveal not only the
scope but also the high degree of interlocking support and
intellectual integration in the proceedings. The various papers
had been prepared for advance distribution among the partici-
pants, each of whom introduced his subject briefly to the
group, whose members then engaged in lengthy and lively
round-table discussion. Notes on the points debated were
kept, then read, amended, and approved at the close of each
session.

Finally, these notes were amalgamated into a general sum-
mary report of the entire proceedings, prepared by Professor
Arthur Kemp of Claremont Men's College, who was Director
of the Symposium and in that capacity responsible for its
excellent arrangements. The writer of this Introduction served
as chairman and was chosen as coordinating editor of this
resultant volume. Professor Helmut Schoeck voluntarily con-
tributed both time and talent to compilation of the Index.

During the sessions there were no guests, no reporters, and
indeed no interruptions of any moment. Three daily sessions,
held morning, afternoon, and night for four days, absorbed
practically all but bedtime for the conferees. Even at meals,
in shifting combinations, the participants continued a line of
discussion which was of such absorbing interest to all that this

Introduction 7

present wider distribution of results seems wholly desirable.
Few of the members of the symposium had personally known
many of the others before this gathering, and one sign of its
notable success is the number of continuing friendships
founded on the exchanges at the Princeton Inn.

So is it always on an exploration or a pilgrimage. And ex-
ploring pilgrims the members of this symposium assuredly
were— even though perforce more sedentary than those im-
mortalized by Chaucer. More than one of the group found a
certain parallelism with the Canterbury Pilgrims, with the
Tabard Inn at Southwark where they assembled, with the
rich variety and deep human insight of each and every
strongly individualized tale.

There is perhaps another similarity, since in both cases the
order of presentation has no relationship with intrinsic merit.
Indeed, as in the Canterbury Tales, each of the following
essays owes strength to its federation with other essentially
independent units.

But since the beautiful essay of John Dos Passos takes
Chaucer as the "fountain-head" of individuality in English
literature, to that participant appropriately falls the lead posi-
tion of that master's "ful worthy" knight. "And he bigan
with right a mery chere his tale anon, and seyde in this
manere. . . ."

Felix Morley
Gibson Island, Maryland
January 12, 1958

Contents

Introduction 5

Felix Moiley

A Question of Elbow Room 1 3

John Dos Passos

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 37

Conway Ziikle

Individuality and Modernity 63

Richaid M. Weaver

Individuality and the General Will 82

Felix Morley

Individuality vs. Equality 103

Helmut Schoeck

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 125

Roger /. Williams

The Historian and the Individual 146

James C. Malin

Capitalism and Freedom 168

Milton Friedman

9

io Contents

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 183

Friediich A. Hayek

Individuality in American History 205

Arthur A. Ekiich, Jr.

As a Man Thinketh 222

Joseph Wood Kiutch

Collectivism and Individualism 237

William M. McGovem

Index of Names 257

Index of Subjects 261

ESSAYS ON INDIVIDUALITY

A Question of Elbow Room

by John Dos Passos

INDIVIDUALITY IS FREEDOM LIVED. WHEN WE USE THE WORD

individuality we refer to a whole gamut of meanings. Starting
from the meanings which pertain to the deepest recesses of
private consciousness, these different meanings can be counted
off one by one like the skins in the cross section of an onion,
until we reach the everyday outer hide of meaning which
crops up in common talk.

l/when we speak commonly, without exaggerated precision,
of an individual, don't we mean a person who has grown up
in an environment sufficiently free from outside pressures and
restraints to develop his own private evaluations of men and
events? He has been able to make himself enough elbow room
in society to exhibit unashamed the little eccentricities and
oddities that differentiate one man from another man. From
within his separate hide he can look out at the world with
that certain aloofness which we call dignity~jNo two men are
alike any more than two snowflakes are alike. However a man
develops, under conditions of freedom or conditions of servi-
tude, he will still differ from other men. The man in jail will
be different from his cellmates but his differences will tend
to develop in frustration and hatred. Freedom to develop in-
dividuality is inseparable from the attainment of what all the
traditions of the race have taught us to consider to be the true
human stature.

Fifty years ago all this would have been the rankest platitude,

*3

14 Essays on Individuality

but we live in an epoch where the official directors of opinion
through the schools, pulpits, and presses have leaned so far
over backwards in their efforts to conform to what they fancy
are the exigencies of a society based on industrial mass produc-
tion, that the defence of individuality has become a life and
death matter.

It is a defence that a man takes on at his peril. The very
word has become suspect. Even to mention individualism or
individuality in circles dedicated to the fashionable ideas of
the moment is to expose oneself to ridicule. "Listening to
papers on individualism— how boring!" exclaimed a lady to
whom I tried to explain over the phone what I was doing in
Princeton.

Casting around for examples which might clarify some of
the meanings of the word individuality, without seeming too
boring, even to heads full of the fashionable negations of the
moment, I find myself falling back on English literature as we
find it on the library shelves.

I'm thinking of the magnificent series of imaginative writ-
ings in modern English that began with Chaucer five hundred
years ago. You can make a very good case for the notion that
there runs through it all a unifying thread which is the measure
of its difference from other literatures. This English literature
is dedicated to the description of man not only as an individual
but as an eccentric. Naturally it is colored throughout by the
peculiar eminence the traditions of English law and of English
thought generally gave to individual rights and individual re-
sponsibility, but it is flavored, to boot, by a real enjoyment
of idiosyncracy. Perhaps English literature will continue to
be the conduit through which our now so discredited passion
for personal liberty will be freshened and stimulated by im-
pulses from past generations. The belief in the uniqueness of
each human being is, after all, not of yesterday. To the Athen-

A Question of Elbow Room 1 5

ians this belief was incarnate on earth. Primitive Christianity
turned it inside out and established it in heaven. Our practical
English forebears managed to bring it down to earth again.

Their earthy individuality is the heart of our literary inheri-
tance. To root that inheritance out of our minds you'll have
to pull the English classics off the shelves of our libraries. The
American educational process, with its bias towards conformity
on the basis of the lowest common denominator, has not
managed to do quite that, at least not yet; but it has suc-
ceeded in letting the classical literature moulder in innocuous
desuetude in the dust of the unvisited stacks. Scrape the
mildew off the backs of the books and you'll find them as
ready as ever to fill the imagination with a rich spawn of
cantankerous human beings.

Chaucer is the fountain head. Right at the beginning, in
the earliest days of the formation of the language, you'll find
in the Canterbury Tales the characteristics which are to be
the special earmark of English literature for the next five hun-
dred years. The minute you step into that Tabard Inn at
Southwark, in the first few lines of the prologue, you find
yourself part of the pilgrimage of all the great characters of
English story-telling. Right away the poet starts describing
people, individuals he enjoys for their own sake. Already he
shows the down-to-earth knowledge of vulgar reality, the gift
for jocose narrative, the appetite for freedom and elbow room,
the sharp satire mellowed by fellow feeling for a great many
varieties of men. These are the qualities which are to char-
acterize the whole literature to come. You feel behind every
word and phrase the driving force of Chaucer's enthusiasm
for individuality in his fellow man, even indeed for eccen-
tricity and oddity.

Not only the men but the women are individuals. It is in
Chaucer that there first appears a certain special attitude
towards women. The women have as much private and per-

16 Essays on Individuality

sonal individuality as the men. Compare them with the women
in the French romances of the period. In the prologue to the
Canterbury Tales, and in the marvelous interludes between,
you meet real women, humorously and tenderly and under-
standingly described, women who stand up in their own right
and say their own say in the world. The Prioress and the Wife
of Bath are the first of a long line of large-scale portraits of
women; the women of Shakespeare's plays from Mistress
Quickly and Juliet's nurse to Hamlet's mother and Lady Mac-
beth; the hapless solitary figure of Vittoria Corombona in the
Duchess of Malfi, the pert matrons of Restoration comedy,
the aware young ladies walking on the lawns of Jane Austen's
country houses, Dickens' female gargoyles out of the London
slums, and the inimitable Becky Sharpe.

Chaucer's men are a zestful crew. They have the high spirits
of people with plenty of elbow room in the world. The foul-
mouthed innkeeper, the scoundrelly pardoner, the miller and
the reeve, the cynical merchant, the wealthy franklin in whose
house it snowed of meat and drink, who foreshadowed Squire
Western and Mr. Wardle the genial landlord of Dingly Dell,
the lawyer who was such a very busy man and yet seemed
ever busier than he was, the mildspoken knight and his well-
bred son, the squire who left half told the story of Cam-
buscan bold.

And through it all the feeling of the road. A man is never
more his single separate self than when he sets out on a
journey. A man is on his own on the road. This excitement
of adventuring from place to place will reappear in some of
Defoe's narratives and in Tom Jones' burlesque adventures
and in the tribulations of Smollett's rascally heroes and in
the preposterous travels of the Pickwickians and the con-
templative excursions of Thoreau and George Borrow.

From the Canterbury Tales on there is insight to be gained
by thinking of the main stream of the literature as a continu-

A Question of Elbow Room 17

ation of Chaucer's pilgrimage. With the coming of the Eng-
lish Renaissance there appear, to be sure, the towering figures
of leaders of men painted with breathless haste on the huge
canvasses of Marlowe and Shakespeare; individuality on a
super-human scale facing the dilemmas, the crimes, the fail-
ures, the glories of the untrammelled will.

The comically sketched low-lives are pushed into the
shadow. But even in Shakespeare's plays the Chaucerian pre-
occupation with the laughable idiosyncracies of all sorts of
men has gone on developing as a contrasting background to
the romantic passions and the bombast of the tragic roles that
fill the center of the stage. This background is often on the
edge of becoming the foreground. Though Sir John Falstaff
seems to have been invented as a mere foil for Prince Hal, he
soon developed, in response to the audience's demands, as a
protagonist in his own right. The fat knight and his rowdy
crew would have found themselves thoroughly at home among
the Canterbury pilgrims. As their story evolves through four
plays it becomes one of the precursers of the English novel.

While the gaudy romanticism of the age of Elizabeth tears
itself to tatters,, the Chaucerian sort of comic naturalism sub-
sists in the dramatists who are trying to reproduce the classical
comedy of manners. With the re-opening of the theaters the
comedy of idiosyncracy will dominate the stage. With the
emergence of prose narrative in Swift's satires and in Defoe's
commonsensical tales the depiction of individuals will become
the main business of the writer. As the modern novel is born
out of Fielding's gargantuan amusement at Richardson's at-
tempt to turn the art of fictional narrative into an apology for
the ideas and prejudices of the rising shopkeeper class, the
Chaucerian naturalism and the Chaucerian satire become its
very substance.

With Tom Jones the novel is established as the chronicle
of individuality. By the time Sterne writes his Tristram Shandy

18 Essays on Individuality

the theme is so thoroughly established that he can treat his
reader to endless whimsical variations. In the nineteenth cen-
tury, when novel-writing will become the passion of the age,
Sterne's whimseys will reappear in more Chaucerian form in
Charles Dickens' portrait gallery of comic characters. Some-
how the English of the great tradition managed, no matter
from what low caste they sprang, to maintain enough elbow
room about them to cherish this appreciation of individuality
as the central pleasure of their lives.

It is certainly no accident that the political institutions
which grew up in the society that produced this literature of
individualism should have been individualistic too. When all
the discussions of the position of man in the framework of
government that had obsessed so many of the best minds of
the century came to a focus in 1776, the chief preoccupation
of the state-builders in America was to establish institutions
in their new country which would allow each citizen enough
elbow room to grow into individuality. They differed greatly
on how best to bring about that state of affairs but there was
no disagreement on fundamental aims. Protection of the in-
dividual's happiness— the assurance of the elbow room he
needed to reach his full stature— was the reason for the state's
existence.

Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris held very differ-
ing views on the problems of government. Jefferson was an
agrarian democrat who believed that every man was capable
of taking some part in the government of the community;
Morris was a city-bred aristocrat who believed that only men
to whom wealth and position had given the advantage of a
special education were capable of dealing with public affairs;
but when Morris wrote George Washington his definition of
statesmanship— "I mean politics in the great Sense, or that
sublime Science which embraces for its Object the Happiness

A Question of Elbow Room 19

of Mankind"— he meant the same thing by the word happiness
as Jefferson did when he wrote it into the Declaration of Inde-
pendence. To both men it meant elbow room. Elbow room is
positive freedom.

Consult any sociologist today as to the meaning of happi-
ness in the social context and he'll be pretty sure to tell you
it means adjustment. Adjustment, if it is freedom at all, is
freedom of a very negative sort. It certainly is the opposite of
elbow room.

To both Morris and Jefferson the ''sublime Science" con-
sisted of designing a government that would allow the greatest
possible freedom to its citizens; to the political leaders and
theorizers of today the "sublime Science" consists in teach-
ing the citizen to adjust himself to the demands of Society
and state. He has to learn to put up with an ever-increasing
lack of elbow room.

We are hardly conscious of the immensity of the change
which has taken place in the aims of statebuilding because we
still use the vocabulary of our individualist tradition in litera-
ture and politics. The change has been so gradual through
the years that we have failed to notice that the words don't
apply any more to the facts they are supposed to describe.
This lag in definition makes it extremely difficult to project
our traditional notions of individuality, which are still thor-
oughly cogent in their own context, into the mid-twentieth
century society we have to live in. Perhaps the reason why we
are so uncomfortable with the very term "individuality" is that
its redefinition will bring us up against a set of realities highly
unpleasant to face.

It's startling to remember that only a hundred and thirty
years, merely the span of a couple of lifetimes, have gone by
since Jefferson died at Monticello, on the same Independence
Day of 1826 when his old friend and political opponent, John

20 Essays on Individuality

Adams, died at Braintree near Boston, whispering, so the old
tradition has it: ''Thomas Jefferson still survives."

These years have seen such a transformation in the shape of
American society that the age of Jefferson and Adams and
Washington and Madison and Hamilton and the rest seems
as far away as the age of Confucius.

People in late eighteenth century America tended to live
out their lives grouped into one of two kinds of social organi-
zation. There was the New England type town where social
standing depended on a combination of godliness with that
possession of this world's goods which was the outward ex-
pression of divine favor. The tendency towards social strati-
fication in at least the eastern Massachusetts towns was well
expressed by the fact that at Harvard College students were
listed according to their social standing instead of according
to their scholastic ability. That doesn't mean that literacy
wasn't highly regarded. The New Englanders were people of
the book. Nor does it mean that they were not politically
democratic. Their government was town meeting where every
man had his say. The society which produced the Adamses
was a democracy tempered by aristocracy.

To the southward there was the plantation society, which
produced George Mason and Jefferson. There men were rated
according to the acreage of their lands. In the Virginia county
governments, as in rural England, the landowners were the
law. Both of these systems were subject to the democratiz-
ing influence of the ebb and flow of the continually re-
newed pioneer enterprises of the new settlements, where skill
and courage and the push necessary for survival were the most
admired qualities, and where universal manhood suffrage was
the political rule. The men of energy and initiative tended
to be attracted to the frontier. The educated men, the men
of book learning, of all these differing communities were
steeped in that spirit of noblesse oblige which had been the

A Question of Elbow Room 21

noble obverse of the arrogance and selfseeking of the British
ruling gentry.

The thing all the Americans— townsmen, fishermen and
sailors of the New England seaports; planters and merchants
from round the Chesapeake; hunters and furtraders from the
Ohio— had in common was that they thoroughly understood
the world they lived in. The technology was simple. From the
age of the Hebrew prophets to the time of the American
revolution the basic operations by which men sowed crops for
food and produced clothing and shelter had changed remark-
ably little. Since the renaissance period there had been a great
improvement in tools, but production was still based on the
skill of the hand and the arm and the eye. Manufacture meant
making by hand.

The family was still almost everywhere the central produc-
tive unit, as it was the central social unit. Manufacture, trade,
farming, and the professions were conducted on a family basis.
The work of apprentices, indentured servants, negro slaves on
the plantations in the south, all meshed into the framework
of a man and his wife and their sons and daughters coping
with life as a group.

Any tolerably bright individual knew from personal experi-
ence how wheeled carriages and sailing ships worked, under-
stood the processes of agriculture and manufacturing, the use
of money, and the technique of buying and selling on the
market place. Much more important, they all knew by direct
personal experience how the different kinds of people worked
who made up their society.

They took human cussedness for granted.

The outstanding fact you learn from reading the letters of
the men of that day was that none of them had any illusions
about how men behaved in the political scheme. A radical
idealist like Jefferson allowed for the self-interest (real or
imagined) of the average voter, or for the vanity and ambition

22 Essays on Individuality

and greed of the office holder, as much as a cynical conserva-
tive like Gouverneur Morris. The difference was that they ap-
plied their knowledge according to different theories as to
what sort of government would most desirably influence hu-
man behavior. Jefferson thought that under proper institu-
tions individuals could be indefinitely improved. Like his
Scottish contemporary, Adam Smith, he trusted to the work-
ings of enlightened self-interest.

Both parties understood the common man as well as any
of the more desperate demogogues we have with us today.
They allowed for his selfseeking, for his shortsightedness, his
timidity, his abominable apathy, his only intermittent public
spirit. The difference was that the statemen of the early re-
public used that "sublime Science" in the service of their
great statebuilding aims. Using men as they found them, they
managed to set up the system of balanced self-government
which made possible the exuberant growth of the United
States.

In Jefferson's day the average citizen had a fair understand-
ing of most of the workings of the society he lived in. The
years that stretch between us and the day of his death have
seen the shape of industry transformed in rapid succession
by steam power, electric power, the internal combustion en-
gine, and, now, by jet propulsion and the incredibly prolifer-
ating possibilities of power derived from nuclear fission and
fusion. Any social system of necessity molds itself into shapes
laid down by the daily occupations of the individual men who
form its component parts. The mass-production methods of
assembly-line industry have caused a society made up of in-
dividuals grouped in families to give way to a society made up
of individuals grouped in factories and office buildings, for
whom family life has been relegated to the leisure hours.

Life in our drastically changing industrial world has be-

A Question of Elbow Room 2 3

come so cut up into specialized departments and vocabularies,
and has become so hard to understand and to see as a whole,
that most people won't even try. Even people of first-rate in-
telligence, at work in various segregated segments of our econ-
omy, tend to get so walled up in the particular work they are
doing that they never look outside of it. Even if they remem-
ber that every man has a duty to give some of his time and
some of his energy to the general good, they don't know how
to go about it.

Enormously complicated political institutions have grown
up in response to the exigencies of the industrial framework.
Instead of the farming communities which Jefferson expected
to be the foundation of self-government we have a population
concentrated in cities and suburbs. Instead of living under
the least possible government, most of the American people
are living under an accumulation of often conflicting sov-
ereignties.

A man working for General Motors in Detroit, for an ex-
ample, is subject to the management of his corporation, and
to the often arbitrary government of the United Auto Work-
ers. He is subject to the traffic police on the road on his way
to and from work, to the taxes and regulations of the town
where he lives, to the taxes and regulations of the state of
Michigan and to the ever-expanding authority of the Federal
government. Each of these sovereignties has the power to
make itself extremely disagreeable if he crosses its bureaucratic
will. To hold his end up against this panoply of disciplinary
powers, the man has only the precarious right to hold up his
hand in the meeting of his union local, and the right to put
his cross on the ballot in an occasional election, opposite the
name of some politician he has perhaps only heard of in the
confusion of electoral ballyhoo.

Is it surprising that the common man is hard to coax out
of the shell of political apathy he has grown to protect him-

24 Essays on Individuality

self from the knowledge of his own helplessness? The first
step towards restoring to this man a sense of citizenship would
be to explain his situation to him in terms which had refer-
ence to the observable facts of his daily life. A fresh political
vocabulary is needed before we can try to reset the individual
cogs so that they mesh into the wheels of government.

None of this means that Thomas Jefferson or John Adams'
aspirations, to build a state which would afford the greatest
possible amount of elbow room to the greatest number of its
citizens, are obsolete. Their "sublime Science" was based on
an understanding of factors in human behavior which have
not changed since the beginnings of recorded history. New-
ton's basic principle of gravitation has not been superseded.
It has been amended and amplified by Einstein's formulae.
Newton's still remains one of the explanations through which
mathematicians cope with the observable facts of physics. In
a somewhat similar way, if men could be found to apply to
political problems the sort of first-rate rigorous thinking which
we have seen applied to physics in our lifetime, and if the
study of the science of statebuilding should thus come into
its own again, the great formulations of the generation of
1776 would still be found valid.

If there were to grow up in this country a generation of
young men and women who felt that the most important
thing in life was to restore elbow room to the people of the
United States they would find in the records of the founders
of the republic a storehouse of the skills and mental attitudes
they would need in their work. They would find that every
word which was spoken or written on the art of politics be-
tween 1775 and 1801 would take on a new urgency.

By a reapplication of the vocabulary of freedom they might
find some formula through which to apply the basic tenets of
individualism as directly to our daily lives as Jefferson and his
friends applied them to the everyday world they know. Lord

A Question of Elbow Room 25

knows for the last twenty years we have done enough talking
about democracy in this country. Maybe the reason why the
talk doesn't turn into useful action is because the terms don't
apply to our lives as we live them.

Jefferson's ideas are particularly cogent to us now because
among the leaders of the American revolution he led the
radical wing which was in favor of more popular rule rather
than less. He was the chief leader of the tendency which led
us to universal adult suffrage. In a letter he wrote a few days
before his death refusing, on account of the state of his health,
an invitation to spend the very Fourth of July which was
destined to be his last with a group of admirers in Washing-
ton City, he spoke happily of the blessings of self-government
and of "the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason
and freedom of opinion," and rephrased the basic conviction
of his life with characteristic vehemence: "The general spread
of the light of science has already laid open to every view the
palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born
with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and
spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God."

It is one of the magnificent ironies of history that the
zealots for total bureaucratic rule, whose dogma provides them
with boots and spurs to ride the mass of mankind, justify
themselves by the same political phraseology which the men
of Jefferson's day hoped would make forever impossible the
regimentation of the many by the few. Unfortunately, the
practice of the demogogic dictatorships abroad is not so far
from our own as we would like to think. The redeeming fea-
ture of our bureaucratic government is that the machinery
still ^subsists within it by which the popular will can effect its
transformation in any conceivable direction. All we need is
the wit and the will.

It is always well to remember that the commonest practice
of mankind is that a few shall impose authority and the ma-

26 Essays on Individuality

jority shall submit. Watch any bunch of children playing dur-
ing a school recess. It is the habit of individual liberty which
is the exception. The liberties we enjoy today, freedom to
express our ideas if we have any, freedom to jump in a car and
drive any place we want to on the highway, freedom to choose
the trade or profession we want to make our living by, are the
survivors of the many liberties won by the struggles and pains
of generations of English-speaking people who somehow had
resistance to authority in their blood. Their passion for indi-
viduality instead of conformity was unique in the world. What
the generation of 1776 did was to organize those traditions
into a new system.

When the British troops marched out of Yorktown to sur-
render to Washington's army one of their bands played a
tune called "The World Turned Upside Down." In the long
run the people of the United States have managed to make
the promise of that tune come true. Underdog has come
mighty near to becoming topdog. The other side of that medal
is that the cult of the lowest common denominator has caused
brains, originality of mind, quality of thought to be danger-
ously disparaged. Conformity has been more prized than in-
dividuality. All the same, we can write in the credit column
that there has never been a society where so many men and
women have shared a fellow feeling for so many other men
and women. With every change in economic organization
new class lines and stratifications have appeared, but they have
hardly outlasted a generation or two. The old saying about
three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves has turned
out profoundly true. Compared to the rest of mankind, we
have come nearest to producing a classless society. Ask any
recent immigrant. Nine times out of ten he will tell you that
what struck him first in the United States was that feeling of
the world turned upside down. The question today is whether,
for all its wide distribution of material goods, this classless

A Question of Elbow Room 27

society offers the individual enough elbow room to make his
life worth living.

Right from the beginning the wise men have said that de-
mocracy would end in the destruction of liberty. Washington
in his last years, and John Adams and the whole Federalist
faction, thought universal suffrage would end in demagogery
and despotism. Their reasoning was the basis of the lamenta-
tions of the school of Brooks Adams and Henry Adams at the
beginning of this century, Hamilton's "your people is a great
beast" was echoed by Justice Holmes in his explosion to Carl
Becker: "Goddamn them all, I say." Since the earliest days
only a small minority have at any time really believed in the
privacy of their own consciences that American democracy
would work. A state of mind among the learned and the well-
born was admirably expressed in a letter Macaulay wrote to
H. N. Randall when Randall was putting the finishing touches
on his biography of Jefferson, in the fifties of the last century.

"You are surprised to learn," Macaulay wrote, "I have not
a high opinion of Mr. Jefferson and I am surprised at your
surprise. I am certain that I never wrote a line and that I
never, in parliament, in conversation or even on the hustings
—a place where it is the fashion to court the populace— uttered
a word advocating the opinion that the supreme authority in
a state ought to be entrusted to the majority of citizens told
by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant
part of society. I have long been convinced that institutions
purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or
civilization or both.

"You think that your country enjoys an exemption from
these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very dif-
ferent opinion. Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is
deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless
extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring popula-
tion will be far more at ease than the laboring population of

28 Essays on Individuality

the old world; and while that is the case the Jeffersonian
policy may continue to exist without causing any fatal ca-
lamity." [Macaulay is launching the theory of the last frontier
which is now popular among certain historians.]

"But the time will come," Macaulay went on, "when New
England will be as thickly populated as Old England. Wages
will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as with us.
You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams. Hundreds
and thousands of artisans will be sometimes out of work. Then
your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress
everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented and
inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him
that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have mil-
lions, while another cannot get a full meal. In bad years there is
plenty of grumbling here and sometimes a little rioting. But it
matters little for here the sufferers are not the rulers. The su-
preme power is in a class, numerous indeed but select, in an ed-
ucated class, in a class which is and knows itself to be deeply
interested in, the security of property, and the maintenance of
order." [This is the type of government Gouverneur Morris
and Alexander Hamilton wanted.] "Accordingly, the malcon-
tents are firmly yet gently restrained. The bad time is got over
without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. The
springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again; work
is plentiful, wages rise and all is tranquility and cheerfulness.

"I have seen England three or four times pass through such
critical seasons as I have described. Through such seasons the
United States will have to pass, in the course of the next cen-
tury, if not of this. How will you pass through them? I heartily
wish you a good deliverance, but my reason and my wishes
are at war and I cannot help forboding the worst. It is quite
plain your government will never be able to restrain a dis-
tressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority
is the government and the rich, who are always a minority,

A Question of Elbow Room 29

are absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when, in the
State of New York a multitude of people, none of whom has
had more than half a breakfast or expects to have more than
half a dinner, will choose the legislature. Is it possible to doubt
what sort of legislature will be chosen? On one side is a states-
man preaching patience, respect for vested rights, a strict ob-
servance of public faith. On the other side is a demogogue
ranting about tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking
why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and
to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest people are in
want of necessities. Which of the two candidates is likely to
be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for
bread?

"I seriously apprehend that you will in some such season of
adversity as I have described do things which will prevent pros-
perity from returning; that you will act like people in a year
of scarcity who devour all the seed corn and thus make the
next year not one of scarcity but of absolute distress. The dis-
tress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stay
you. Your constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said,
when society has entered on this downward progress, either
civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or
Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong
hand or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid
waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman
Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns
and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from with-
out, and your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered
within your own country by your own institutions.

"Thinking this, of course I cannot reckon Jefferson among
the benefactors of mankind."

Macaulay's practical experience in Parliament gave him a
particularly sharp insight into political behavior. This letter is
an early statement of Spengler's underlying theme, of that of

30 Essays on Individuality

Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses, and of many more
recent expositions of the danger of the cult of the lowest com-
mon denominator. If there should grow up in this continent
a generation of men and women ready to give their lives to
defending the last strongholds of the practice of individual
liberty, their first duty would be to prove, by word and deed,
that Macaulay and Spengler and Ortega y Gasset were wrong.
The imperative need of our time is to prove to ourselves first,
and to the rest of the world after, that the methods of self-
government can assure elbow room to the individual man in
an industrial society.

A solution to the problem would be seemingly hopeless if
new factors had not appeared which Macaulay had no way of
foreseeing. One is the immense increase in productivity. An-
other is the mass distribution of mass-produced goods which
has resulted from high wages. Macaulay had no way of know-
ing that the American industrialist and the American farmer
would be producing within a hundred years such a profusion
of goods that the problems facing our political economy would
be those of surplus rather than scarcity. Whenever we get a
breathing space from the waste of war, we start to pile up
such mountains of wheat and corn, such rivers of crude oil,
such avalanches of automobiles, washing machines, hedge
clippers, of everything you can think of, that the economy gets
the blind staggers.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal revolution had all the ear-
marks of the sort of uprising Macaulay anticipated with so
much dread. We had our hundreds and thousands of artisans
out of work. We had our mutinous and discontented labor.
"Tax, tax, tax. Spend, spend, spend. Elect, elect, elect" was the
watchword. The sufferers marched to the polls and elected
and reelected Franklin Roosevelt who sure ranted about the
tyranny of capitalists and bankers. The rich were despoiled

A Question of Elbow Room 31

through the income tax. The poor were to a certain extent
subsidized. But the end result, instead of the republic's being
laid waste by the barbarians from below, was that nearly every-
body got richer, at least in material things.

Nobody who remembers what these United States looked
like in the nineteen twenties can drive across the country today
without seeing the spread of electric power, the improvement
in roads, in school buildings, in the health of the children
you see in the playgrounds, in all kinds of housing, in all the
facilities for more comfortable living. The people of this coun-
try are richer in material goods than they were thirty years
ago and that wealth is very much more evenly distributed.

Events have disproved Macaulay's theory that wealth is un-
safe in any hands but those of the rich. It is as untenable as
the complementary theory that taking their wealth away from
the rich adds to the well-being of the poor. Wealth, in mod-
ern industrial society, would seem to lie in the full use of tech-
nology and knowhow to produce goods, and in seeing to it
that the men who produce them get enough return for their
effort to be able to buy and enjoy the goods they help to make.
At the same time the intellectual leveling which has come
about through mass communication would seem to have left
the working man, in an industrial structure so cut up into
segments that no man can see beyond the end of his nose,
neither more nor less capable than the businessman or the
farmer of dealing with political problems.

Though the first results of mass communication, as of mass
education, have been to level thinking to a lowest common
denominator set pretty near the idiot level, it is possible to
hope that the eventual results will be immensely to broaden
the educated class "deeply interested in the security of prop-
erty and the maintenance of order," to whose hands Macaulay
wished to entrust the supreme power.

On the other hand, future historians are going to puzzle

32 Essays on Individuality

over the fact that just at the moment when American indus-
trial society was showing how youthful and elastic it was, and
how adaptable to changing conditions, so many well-educated
young men threw overboard the whole idea of self-government
within a framework of law, and turned to the Communist
Party. They are going to puzzle about our failure as a nation
to draw any advantage for ourselves or for the world from a
series of military victories in the course of two world wars. At
the moment when our traditional social values were proving
their practical effectiveness the underlying ethical structure
was showing every sign of coming apart at the seams.

Somewhere along the way we lost our conviction that the
best government was self-government. In our enthusiasm for
turning over every social problem to the administrative bu-
reaucracy for solution, we forgot that democracy is based on
the maxim that the solution of the problems of social life is
the business of the people themselves. Neither Macaulay nor
Jefferson, when they scanned the horizon for dangers threat-
ening American democracy, foresaw this prodigious growth of
a bureaucracy armed with police powers, a bureaucracy which
bids fair to become a vested interest in its own right.

The whole subject has been confused, of course, by the
doubletalk of the zealots for total bureaucratic rule, a double-
talk where the old vocabulary of democratic liberties is made
to mean something wholly different from what was originally
intended; but the fact remains that Americans are finding it
harder and harder to apply the words and phrases that fitted
so well the society that Jefferson and Madison lived in, to the
pyramidal social structures of today.

Man is an institution-building animal. The shape of his in-
stitutions is continually remolding his life. Every new process
for the production of food and goods, or for their distribution,
changes the social structure. Careers are tailored to fit each
new process. People's lives become intertwined with the com-

A Question of Elbow Room 33

plicated structures of vested interests. With every institutional
change adaptations are demanded. Adaptation is slow and
difficult and painful. The symptoms of insufficient adaptation
are maladjustment, frustration and apathy. The bureaucratic
social structure that has grown up round the present type of
industrial production has developed so fast that we are find-
ing it hard, perhaps harder than we realize, to operate the
system of checks and balances against inordinate power which
the English-speaking people built up through centuries of re-
sistance to authority.

It was Jefferson's sarcastic young friend from Orange
County, little James Madison, who set down, in the often-
quoted number 51 of the Federalist, the basic hardheaded rule
on which all the men of the generation of 1776, radical and
conservative alike, based their political theories: "In framing a
government which is to be administered by men over men, the
great difficulty lies in this; you must first enable the govern-
ment to control the governed and in the next place oblige it
to control itself."

The first problem which men will face, when they try to
make elbow room for themselves and for their fellows in the
new type of society now coming into being, will be the prob-
lem of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has become dominant in gov-
ernment, in industry, and in the organizations of labor. The
first interest of these bureaucracies, as of all human institu-
tions, is in their own survival. If these bureaucratic hierarchies,
which seem unavoidable in a mass society, can be harnessed
to the dynamic needs of self-government, the task of reversing
the trend towards individual serfdom into a trend towards in-
dividual liberty may not be as hard as it seems at the first
glance.

The first prerequisite is a fresh understanding, untrammeled
by prejudice or partisan preconceptions, of the institutions we

34 Essays on Individuality

live in. Such a view is unlikely to result from the labors of re-
search teams or sponsored surveys. The prime discoveries are
more likely to be made by solitary individuals, who have man-
aged by hook or crook to find the elbow room they need to
look about them, and the self-sufficiency they need to observe
their world objectively.

Observing objectively demands a sort of virginity of the
perceptions. A man has to clear all preconceived notions out
of his head in a happy self-forgetfulness where there is no gap
between observation and description.

There's a description of a variety of cuttlefish in Darwin's
Voyage of the Beagle that gives a notion of the delights of
first-hand observation:

Although common in pools of water left by the retiring tide
these animals are not easily caught. By means of their long
arms and suckers they could drag their bodies into very nar-
row crevices; and when thus fixed, it required great force to re-
move them. At other times they darted tail first, with the
rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to the other,
at the same instant discoloring the water with a dark chestnut
brown ink. These animals can also escape detection by a very
extraordinary chameleonlike power of changing their color.
They appear to vary their tints according to the nature of the
ground over which they pass; when in deep water, their gen-
eral shade was brownish purple, but when placed on land
their dark tint changed into one of yellowish green. The color,
examined more carefully, was a French grey, with numerous
minute spots of bright yellow: the former of these varied in
intensity, the latter entirely disappeared and appeared again
by turns. These changes were effected in such a manner that
clouds, varying in tint between a hyacinth red and a chestnut
brown were continually passing over the body.

The sensitivity of a man's perceptions is in no way increased
by the squinting of eyes and the straining of ears. The state of

A Question of Elbow Room 35

mind of the dispassionate observer is somewhat analogous to
the hunter's. An expert hunter in a duck blind, or walking
behind his dogs round the edges of a cornfield or waiting by a
deerpath in the woods, thinks of nothing. He forgets himself.
He lets all his senses come awake to respond to the frailest
intimations that come to his ears or his eyes of the movement
of game. Really good shots, the fellows who really bring down
the quail, are people who are able to forget who they are and
become for the moment just an eye and an ear and a gun.

To report objectively some scene, some situation, the move-
ment of some animal, the shape of some organism under the
microscope, a man has to fall into a state of unpreoccupied
alertness very similar to the state of a sharpshooter stretched
out under cover to take a bead on an enemy.

This hunter or sharpshooter knows what to look for. For
years he has been building up a bank of experience. A good
ornithologist can give one glance into a thicket where I see
only some English sparrows and pick out a wren sitting on
her nest, and three different kinds of warblers. As a result of
a lifetime of observation a good hunter can tell, from the
slightest disturbance of twigs and pinetags on a path through
the woods, whether it was a deer or a raccoon that just passed
that way.

The trouble with most classroom education is that the em-
phasis is on the name of the thing instead of on the thing itself.
Classroom education teaches men to believe that if they have
labeled and pigeonholed something they have disposed of it.
So the educated man is liable to start to apply the label before
he has really seen the object. To describe something objec-
tively you have to see the individual thing before you name it.

Of course where the uneducated man falls down is in in-
tegrating what he has seen into some rational scheme. He's
likely to try to fit the picture into some purely superstitious
frame. Still, before you have an experience or an event fresh

36 Essays on Individuality

and new and individual enough to be worth integrating into
your rational scheme, you've got, just for a slice of a second,
to let yourself fall into the uneducated man's naive and
ignorant frame of mind. Astonishment is a wonderful stimulus
to thought.

You have to meet each new phenomenon with a clean slate
as if you had never heard of it before. Most of the time we live
in a shut-in universe of labels and classifications and verbal-
isms. It's only in brief glimpses that we have the luck to see
things as they are, instead of as we were told they ought to be.

I wonder sometimes if the curiosity that makes a man want
to see clearer and clearer isn't related to the hunters' or track-
ers' alertness, which might well have been one of the qualities
most needed for survival far back in the history of the race.

The state of mind that makes for objective description, like
every state of mind in which you forget who you are, has a
sort of primeval happiness about it. You look out at the world
with a fresh eye as if it were the morning of the first day of
creation.

There is a lucid little paragraph in a translation from the
original Latin of William Harvey's Circulation of the Blood:

We have a small shrimp in these countries, which is taken
in the Thames and in the sea, the whole of whose body is
transparent; this creature, placed in a little water, has fre-
quently afforded myself and particular friends an opportunity
of observing the motions of the heart with the greatest dis-
tinctness, the extreme parts of the body presenting no obstacle
to our view, but the heart being perceived as though it had
been seen through a window.

Before we can start even to suggest the readjustments needed
to assure fresh elbow room for the individual we must manage
to see the shape of our society as clearly as Harvey saw the
heart of the shrimp.

Some Biological Aspects of
Individualism

by Conway Zirkle

ON NOVEMBER 24, 1959, AN EVEN CENTURY WILL HAVE ELAPSED

since the first publication of Charles Darwin's great work,
The Origin of Species.

No other book of the nineteenth century made so great an
impact on the thinking of our times and no other biologist
has ever placed the human species so securely and so accurately
into its natural setting. Soon after the Origin appeared, Sir
Charles Lyell and Thomas Henry Huxley published more de-
tailed accounts of human evolution and, a little later, Darwin
himself focused his attention on the origin of the human
race. This application of the doctrine of evolution to human
beings brought us face to face with our own species and put
us in a position where we could gain a better knowledge of
ourselves. Such knowledge is indispensable if we are to under-
stand what kind of creatures we really are and what we must
do to improve our lot.

Since these early pioneers placed Homo sapiens in his proper
cosmic niche, their successors have made new and important
discoveries, which both verify and supplement the original
contributions. Today we know definitely that we belong in
the world of nature and that it is possible to explain our ad-
vent through the operation of natural processes.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the idea

37

38 Essays on Individuality

that mankind might be only an accidental product of the inter-
action of inanimate forces was very unsettling and very natu-
rally started controversy. The disputes which followed in the
wake of The Origin of Species led to much confusion and
some acrimony. Perhaps no other scientific work has ever been
misunderstood so frequently, and perhaps no other series of
misunderstandings has ever persisted so disastrously. The
theory of evolution penetrates to the very core of our being.
It deals with the fundamental aspects of our existence, our
character, and our behavior. No part of us can escape its im-
pact or its application. We are as we are because of the way
our species has evolved in the past, and we shall be as we shall
be because of the course our future evolution takes.

From the very first, it was clear that if man has evolved he
must belong to an unstable and changing species; a species,
moreover, that had existed for ages in many different environ-
ments; one that had lived under many and diverse conditions.
It was just as clear that the ancestors of the human stock had
been able to survive their past vicissitudes only by adapting
themselves to the different circumstances as they arose. In
view of this history, extending back to the very dawn of life,
it seemed rather silly for the human race to seek anywhere for
permanence or security. Certainly it seemed futile for any such
race to devise for itself any absolute systems of behavior or to
search the universe for absolute ethical codes or mortal stand-
ards—or even for codes which contain merely ad hoc directives
for ethical contingencies.

Thus the acceptance of evolution had logical consequences
in many fields. It did not take the thinking fraction of our
species long to realize that it would be well for us to learn how
evolution works and to adapt ourselves to the process, if we
thought our well-being desirable or even that our species
should continue to exist. Moreover, it was soon apparent that
we could not call a halt to the process, but would continue

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 39

to evolve even if we made no effort to alter or direct the course
of our future evolution. Obviously no species as variable as
ours can ever stop evolving, no matter how much it tries.
Evolution is clearly a natural process inherent in life itself,
and evolution will continue as long as life lasts. Under any
and all circumstances then, the human race will be altered as
times passes— in fact, as long as it survives— but it might not
change in a desirable direction.

One consequence of this newer knowledge, however, was
very cheering. The fact that we had become aware of our own
evolution allowed us to participate in the process and even
made our participation mandatory. Insight into our biological
history was bound to affect our standards and our behavior,
and these, in turn, would affect the conditions under which
we live— affect the surroundings in which we shall evolve. Some
of the more optimistic of the nineteenth century thinkers
even proposed that we take over the management of our own
evolution and channel it toward some preconceived goal. To-
day we know that we are not entirely the masters of our fate,
certainly not the captains of our souls, but neither are we
innocent and passive bystanders. Many factors in nature inter-
act to cause and direct our evolution, but our understanding
of evolution has itself become one of the factors.

By this time it may be asked why a paper, in a symposium
on "Individuality and Personality," should begin by calling
attention to some elementary aspects of human evolution.
The answer is to be found both in the theory of evolution
itself and the history of our knowledge of the subject. Indeed,
practically all of our present-day attitudes toward ourselves
both as individuals and as members of society— our attitudes
toward individualism as contrasted with collectivism— toward
the common man and the uncommon man, have been modi-
fied by one role or another that we have assigned to the in-
dividual man in the evolution of his species. Many of our

40 Essays on Individuality

present-day attitudes towards individuality pre-date our knowl-
edge of evolution, but none of them has escaped the influence
of evolutionary thinking.

It is perhaps fortunate that the nineteenth century evolu-
tionists did not agree as to the role of the individual in evolu-
tion, because a premature or erroneous conclusion, if univers-
ally accepted, might have affected our action disastrously. As
we know now, the earlier explanations of evolution, while
clear, logical, and complete, were not all true; and actions
based on false premises more often than not have lamentable
consequences. At the time of Darwin, no single explanation
of evolution would fit all the known facts and evolution could
be explained only by combining several of the current hypoth-
eses.

Again fortunately, the two leading hypotheses assigned
roles to the individual which were diametrically opposed, and
this made it possible for each hypothesis, if used properly, to
check the extremes of the other, but— and this time unfortu-
nately—they were rarely so used. When the educated guesses
of the biologists spread into the public domain, many of the
complexities were lost and the interactions and the buffering
effects of the hypothetical causes of evolution were missed.
One or another type of simplification pre-empted one or an-
other ideology and, today, the effects of these ancient sim-
plicisms are still with us, and still infect our climate of opinion.

As is usual in such cases, the overly simplified doctrines
were extended until they reached some rather unintelligent
extremes. Individuals, as such, especially very able individuals,
were assigned important but contradictory roles in society,
roles that ranged all the way from glorious hero to depraved
villain. The rugged individual qua individual was looked upon
by some as an exemplary model of the future man, who would
lead us to the dawn of a new day, and by others as a horrible
example of a reactionary atavism, as a man who stood squarely

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 41

against all humanitarian progress. The doctrine of evolution,
however, was not solely responsible for the divergent views as
to the proper role of the individual in society. The intellectual
ferment of the early nineteenth century had already focused
attention on the subject.

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, there had been
growing appreciation of the value of personal liberty and
gradual recognition of the fact that intellectual freedom not
only adds to human dignity and importance but that it also
is prerequisite for human progress. The whole picture, how-
ever, was neither simple nor clear. There had been some spec-
tacular abuses of popular liberty— more emergent savagery than
the forward-lookers would admit— and some of the conse-
quences of free thought had brought confusion to well-tested
codes of conduct. Ancient abuses, it is true, were being cured,
but a number of the best loved and most highly respected be-
liefs were being challenged.

In spite of the clash of contradictory opinions and the more
than average amount of intellectual confusion that existed at
the time of Darwin, the stage was well set for an appreciation
of the value of exceptionally able individuals. Individual en-
terprise in business was rapidly improving the lot of mankind.
The freeing of business from its medieval shackles had allowed
it to grow spectacularly. To many thinkers it seemed that, if
some freedom from governmental restraint were good, more
would be better. In fact, some even held that the least possible
restraint would be best. The doctrine of hissez taiie had be-
come respectable and popular except to some conservatives—
to most liberals it even seemed axiomatic. Herbert Spencer and
Walter Bagehot went so far as to give it a cosmic backing by
tying it into the principles of evolution. Indeed, hissez fake
was looked upon as a necessary condition for any rational
economic system— an economic system compatible with na-
ture. And, of course, all human conventions and conduct had

42 Essays on Individuality

to be "natural" if they were to be valid— if they were to be
suitable for a species which had evolved in nature. Mankind
had reached its present dominance over all other forms of life
through evolution and, according to Darwin, evolution had
come about through the process of natural selection— through
success in the struggle for existence. The more advanced think-
ers of the period, the then contemporary progressives, even
believed that, within human society, this natural selection—
this struggle for existence— should take the form of business
competition in an economy that was completely free. This ex-
tension of natural selection into human society is now called
social-Darwinism, a doctrine that practically dominated eco-
nomic thinking during the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury.

On the other hand, some of the evils of unrestrained busi-
ness competition were too spectacular to be hidden and it was
requiring more and more talent on the part of the social-Dar-
winians to ignore them. Others did not wish to ignore, but
sought rather to emphasize and even to exaggerate them. Some
few even looked upon competition itself as inherently evil. If
many able individuals, when free to exercise their superiority,
could and did profit at the expense of their more stupid
brothers, then the natural way to prevent such exploitation
seemed to be to lessen freedom, the theory being that the
more such individuals can be forced to conform to the stand-
ards of the masses, the less they can harm society. Some hu-
manitarians even looked upon the masses themselves as the
most important component of humanity because they were
the most numerous. So a simple and easily remembered slogan,
"the greatest good to the greatest number," became the goal
of many reformers.

The communism of Karl Marx professed to have this objec-
tive and, as its ostensible purpose, it developed a program for
equalizing the status of all individuals. Communism set as its

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 43

goal an equalitarian society, a society wherein all men would
be equal, not only in law and in their privileges and natural
rights, but even in their biological potentialities. According to
Marx's limited understanding of evolution, the biological
equipment of all men could be made equal in a generation or
so and, once equalized, the inherent ability of every individual
could be kept the same. When this goal was reached, society,
free from all such disturbing factors as personal ambition in
its members would, supposedly, run itself automatically and
effectively, and soon the state itself with all its governmental
functions would "wither away." The state, having served its
purpose in a barbarous world, would vanish and be no longer
needed in the glorious, classless world of the future. Laissez
faire was actually re-entering the social structure but this time
through the back door, brought in by Marx himself.

The individualistic theoreticians of unrestrained business
competition and the collectivistic Marxian communists had
both developed their ideologies before Darwin published The
Ohgin of Species, before anything at all was known about
human evolution or of its relevance to social ideals. But when
they learned that mankind had come into being through
natural processes, they lost little time in applying the newly
discovered knowledge to their political and economic theories.
The applications, however, were highly selective and far from
complete. Both sets of doctrinaires accepted only that portion
of evolution theory that was compatible with their ideal sys-
tems of society and they ignored or trimmed away all the rest
until the theory of evolution was reduced to a doctrine that
would fit the preconceived programs of reform.

Evolution, as we know, is a complex process, too complex
in fact to fit into any simplistic scheme for improving man-
kind. At first, however, most of those who accepted the the-
ory did not recognize its complexity. Few even saw it as a
whole and, to make matters worse, practically everyone ac-

44 Essays on Individuality

cepted a number of beliefs that we now know to be false. At
the time, nothing was easier than for zealots of many kinds to
pick and choose the hypotheses that they liked, and to mold,
from their gleanings, a doctrine to suit their hearts' desires.
Some of these doctrines are still with us and still influence our
collective thinking although, today, their fundaments rest on
nothing firmer than vested ignorance. But to understand these
doctrines we shall have to examine their origins.

Darwin called his great book The Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, etc. and he explained evolution
by ascribing to nature the ability to preserve certain types
which had arisen fortuitously and to discard others. Nature
achieved this by means of an enormous over-production of
young, and she followed this excessive production by a selec-
tive death rate. Malthus had noted this over-production long
before Darwin, and Darwin admitted that he got the idea
from Malthus, but Malthus had never recognized the fact that
the death rate could be selective— that it could be different for
different types.

The individuals who were better adapted to their surround-
ing conditions survived in nature and were defined as the fit,
and these fit lived and begat their kind in contrast to the unfit
who perished and left no offspring. If evolution were a good
thing, and the speeding up of its operation a worthy activity,
then helping the fit to survive was an act of virtue; but this
virtue would be lost if the same assistance were extended to
the unfit. Indeed, without the non-survival of the unfit, evolu-
tion would be blocked. Consequently, to assist the unfit not to
survive was an activity that made for evolutionary progress.
Here, then, was justification for a type of individualism which
was antithetical to the traditional Christian virtues and, in-
deed, to most of the ethical codes of mankind.

Now there is no avoiding the fact that nature is often
brutal, that tragedy in nature is not unusual, and that evolu-

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 45

tionary progress often results from a vicious combat, a strug-
gle for existence. These facts had long been known, but most
people were happier when they were thinking about some-
thing else. Tennyson, however, had faced the cruelties of na-
ture with courage, and in 1855, four years before the Origin
of Species was published, had written in Maud:

The Mayfly's torn by the swallow,

the sparrow spear'd by the shrike.
And the whole little wood where I sit

is a world of plunder and prey.

Consistently, a character in his later playlet, The Promise
oi May (1882), declaimed:

And if my pleasure breeds another's pain,
Well— is not that the course of nature too,

The philosophers also were aware that nature ignored their
humanitarian thought. In 1819, just forty years before the
Origin was published, Schopenhauer had compared the suffer-
ing of an animal being eaten with the pleasure of the animal
doing the eating, concluding that the pain outweighed the
pleasure. Thus the stage was set for a quick understanding of
the moral implications of natural selection, although, as we
shall see, the understanding was defective. Today we can ap-
preciate the dilemma of the nineteenth century evolutionists
—humane individuals to a man— when, without meaning tor
they seemed to give support to a barbaric ethical system.

A full discussion of the problem is not feasible here, but
we may give our passing attention to two of its results. First,
we can trace back to a perversion of this code the horrors of
both the recent and existing concentration camps and the
attempts of ''superior races" to despoil the "inferior" ones.
Second, we can attribute to the harshnesses of the code the
weakminded escapism of those who would remove mankind
from the biological world. But both the savagery and the es-

46 Essays on Individuality

capism are based on misunderstandings of oversimplifications
of a sound scientific principle. They both overlook the fact
that the traditional virtues do exist and are widely distributed.
This existence of the virtues means that the virtues them-
selves are fit and owe their continued existence to the fact that
they aid the survival of those individuals who practice them.
Their existence can be justified by nature just as the existence
of any other property of living matter can be justified and, at
this point, we come to the very heart of the biological relation-
ship of the individual to his group.

The nature of the behavior patterns which evolve into what
we call virtues depends upon the nature of the units which have
been successful in the struggle for existence. For animals, who
live alone and are selected as separate individuals, the egotisti-
cal traits are good. The lone wolf, however, is not in a very
strong position. Gregariousness has survival value because ani-
mals who gang up are generally able to kill their competitors
who do not. When animals live together in groups, nature gen-
erally selects the group as a unit as well as the separate indi-
viduals who make up the group. The group as a whole is either
fit or unfit. The strength of the strong then becomes the
strength of the group. Thus the characteristics which will en-
able the group to survive have been selected and, among these
characteristics, is the ability to cooperate.

Now, in a group, altruistic characteristics have top sur-
vival value for, without them, the group could not exist. A
harmonious group that has developed a high degree of team
play— all for one and one for all— can generally defeat any
pack of prima donnas. Even the self-sacrifice of an individual
may be justified biologically if it enables his group to survive.
The civilized custom of saving ''women and children first"
in an emergency or time of danger, is both an act of virtue
and sound biology. Indeed its virtue can be explained by the
fact that it is sound biologically. Groups composed of what

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 47

we consider decent citizens are actually stronger than those
composed of the self-centered and the uncooperative. Any be-
havior pattern that helps to preserve a species represents, for
that species, the highest virtues. Thus natural selection ac-
counts for the present existence of both the egotistic and the
altruistic traits. In an effective species these traits will be kept
in proper balance. Too much egotism and the individual may
become a vicious criminal, too much altruism and he becomes
a ready-made victim for exploitation. Both egotism and altru-
ism are selected by nature.

Natural selection, we know today, is a major factor in evolu-
tion. Together with mutation pressure and a chance loss of
genes (in small populations) it explains how evolution takes
place. When natural selection first made its impact on ethical
theory, however, mutation pressure was an unknown factor
and the very existence of the genes was not suspected. With-
out these ancillary factors, natural selection could not explain
evolution completely. But, fortunately for the peace of mind
of the evolutionists, if not for the accuracy of their conclu-
sions, there was another explanation of evolution that supple-
mented natural selection to perfection and the two hypotheses
together accounted for all the known facts.

This second supposed cause of evolution was known as "the
inheritance of acquired characters," a doctrine that had been
accepted generally for well over two thousand years. Not until
late in the nineteenth century was its validity questioned seri-
ously. Then the critical experiments, designed to test its
validity, gave negative results and these experiments, incident-
ally, were made by the thousands. Also, the growing knowl-
edge of biology became incompatible with the notion that
acquired characters were inherited, and now the belief has
been abandoned by all honest and critical biologists. During
the time when it was a respectable hypothesis, however, it had
a real influence upon the educated laity.

48 Essays on Individuality

The doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characters, like
that of natural selection, also assigned two divergent roles to
the individual in the evolution of his species. If the character-
istics that an individual acquires during his life can be trans-
mitted to his progeny, then his experiences and the effects of
environment upon him assume a genetic importance. All liv-
ing conditions which improve him as an individual would also
improve his progeny, hence also his species. In addition, the
transmission of acquired characters would furnish a technique
for securing a real biological equality of all individuals. That is,
an altruistic concern by the exceptionally able for the welfare
of their less fortunate fellows, giving every possible advantage
to the backward and the stupid fraction of mankind, would,
in time, made these depressed human specimens equal to the
best.

Once equality were reached, the whole population could
move forward as a unit and everyone would evolve in the same
direction and, with very little social adjustment, at the same
rate. No longer need evolution depend upon an elite fraction
of a species superseding the mass of the mediocre, only to be
superseded in turn by a new and super-elite. "From each ac-
cording to his ability, to each according to his needs" could,
under these conditions, be the slogan of a rapidly evolving
and improving species. Thus it is not remarkable that the
present communists, as well as those others who get their
intellectual directives from Marx and Engels, accept the in-
heritance of acquired characters as an article of faith.

But another and antithetical application of the doctrine can
also be made and the two applications are so far apart that
men, as philosophically and ethically antagonistic as Karl Marx
and Herbert Spencer, could both incorporate the doctrine
into their systems of thought. According to this second view,
the successful social-Darwinian (or rather Spencerian) com-
petitor, by grabbing the best of everything and retaining a

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 49

disproportionate share, could assure that his children would
have "the most of the best" and, strengthened by their su-
perior environment, they would be in a better position to
grab for themselves and for their own children and so on, as
long as evolution lasted. In such a system "he should take who
has the power and he should keep who can" and this taking
and keeping would ensure evolutionary progress.

When we look back upon the intellectual ferment of the
nineteenth century, we can hardly fail to see the influence
that the then current biological theories exerted upon the more
advanced thinking of the period. It is hardly astonishing that
both the authoritarian and the liberal systems, which jelled
at the time, include within themselves one or another of the
explanations of evolution. And any system which required
the stability of a religion would naturally retain the explana-
tion. Today, communism still accepts in toto the biological
line set by Marx and Engels. We are all aware of the recent
outlawing of genetics in the communist world and of the limi-
ted and partisan acceptance of Darwin's contributions by the
communists, even though in their universities they teach
courses in what they call "Darwinism."

Biology today has as much relevance to our social problems
as it ever had. We still live in a biological world no matter
what we may do to avoid it, and the only way we can leave
the biological world is to die. Of course, we do not live only
in a biological world. We are gregarious and live in society—
in a social world— but this social world cannot exclude the
biological as long as the individual members of society breathe,
eat and reproduce themselves biologically. Consequently, all
attempts to exclude the biological factors from social thought
will fail whenever the thinking is honest, and all that such
attempts accomplish is to call attention to the thinker's escap-
ism. The biological and evolutionary factors, however, often
affect us indirectly— through our society and within the milieu

50 Essays on Individuality

of our cultural environment. Now, at last, we can observe
their indirect action and evaluate the complex interplay of the
biological and the social factors; an interaction, incidentally,,
which has played a major role in human evolution.

Unfortunately, evolution has become a very technical and
complicated subject. This has removed it from the field of
general education and thus from the intellectual equipment
of the generality. Many even of our better educated fellow
citizens are quite innocent of any knowledge of the subject.
We know today that evolution cannot be understood by any-
one who is ignorant of genetics, systematics (of both living
and extinct life forms), and even of mathematics.

Evolution is possible only through a differential reproduc-
tive and survival rate— only through the survival of the fit. In
our species, the fit are those best suited for living in human
society. It would be well to emphasize, however, that there is
nothing absolute about evolutionary fitness. The fittest are
merely those who survive in greater numbers under the exist-
ing conditions and who reproduce their type more success-
fully than their rivals reproduce theirs. When conditions
change, a different complex of characters may constitute fit-
ness.

Human culture is the major factor that determines which
types of individuals are the fit and which are the unfit. But
human culture always passes into the custody of those it se-
lects. If they cannot preserve the culture, then the culture itself
becomes unfit and perishes. Our histories show one collapse
of culture after another and, when a culture falls, it is always
replaced by some simpler system which seems better suited
to the type of citizen selected by it. This interaction of bio-
logical and cultural changes constitutes a feed-back mecha-
nism and now we have evidence that such a feed-back mecha-
nism—though one working opposite to the one described here
—was responsible for human beings evolving so rapidly away

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 51

from and beyond all their simian relatives. The feed-back in-
teractions of our cultural and our biological evolution have
made our species truly unique. No other species ever experi-
enced such a complex cultural and biological interaction, be-
cause no other species ever developed such a complex culture
to act as an agent of biological selection.

In this, our human evolution, the individual plays a dual
role. Evolutionary progress occurs only when the biological
reproduction of superior individuals exceeds that of the me-
diocre. But this reproduction can occur only under certain
cultural conditions— only in a culture which demands superior
qualities in those who live and leave offspring. In our past
evolutionary history, these conditions have arisen continu-
ously as human culture became more complex and this ever-
growing complexity has been brought about in turn through
the personal activities of superior individuals. Once we recog-
nize that our culture is the chief agency in nature that selects
us, we can readily grasp the fact that individuals who change
or modify our culture actually contribute to and modify our
biological evolution.

But before we can trace further this role of the exceptional
individual in our evolution, we will have to determine what
it is that produces such individuals, and this brings us to the
modern science of genetics. We will have to glance for a mo-
ment at the machinery of our heredity. We know that our
species is extremely heterozygous and this means that human
beings do not breed "true." Sometimes, musicians beget musi-
cians, poets beget poets, and scientists beget scientists. These
instances, however, are rare and are due to many factors. Out-
standing men more often than not have fathers who are not
particularly outstanding. Genetically we are much like our
hybrid-corn, which does not duplicate its own exceptional
virtues in its progeny, and we are also like our fruit trees that
do not breed true from seed. Many of our geniuses have chil-

52 Essays on Individuality

dren but nearly always the children are only "seedlings." If we
could reproduce our truly great men vegetatively, as we do
our fruit trees, we could, of course, have them in almost any
number.

A word of warning is indicated at this point. The fact that
practically no human beings breed "true" is no indication at
all that men are equal biologically or that the progeny of dif-
ferent men have equal potentialities. We know now that the
opposite is the case. Here we will merely state that large,
heterozygous populations continually produce extreme Men-
delian segregants and that our great men— our exceptionally
able fellows— are such segregants. At this point we are con-
cerned merely with the role of such human segregants in alter-
ing the biological potentialities— altering the gene frequencies
—of the stocks that produced them.

The total number of such segregants may be minute when
compared with the millions of individuals within the whole
population but, over the years, such segregants will be numer-
ous. They will also deviate from the norm of the population
in all recognizable ways. Many segregants will not meet with
conditions suitable for the development of their peculiar
talents and they will have to remain mute and inglorious—
also guiltless. Some few, however, will fall into a favorable
milieu and will become historical characters; become great
heroes or great villains. Some will even affect the course of
history, of culture, of society itself. These are the segregants
who actually become factors in evolution.

The acknowledgment of the role of the extreme Mendelian
segregant might seem superficially to be an endorsement of
the Great Man theory of history. Actually it is not. The Great
Man theory of Carlyle can be shown to be as inadequate as all
other monophyletic theories. The extreme Mendelian segre-
gant is a factor, however, and an important one, but it is only
one factor among many. Our only concern here is to examine

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 53

the manner in which such Great Men alter our culture and
thus, indirectly, our biological evolution. A few examples will
make the process clear.

The inventor of the bow and arrow undoubtedly gave his
group or tribe an enormous advantage in the struggle for ex-
istence. The power of shooting greatly augmented the effici-
ency of the hunters and, thus, the food supply. This led to
an increased population. As a military weapon, the bow and
arrow gave the people who possessed it the ability to expand
at the expense of their competitors. Whether the bow was
invented only once, or many times, makes no real difference.
In either case, during the period between invention and spread,
it gave a different survival value to those tribes which had it
from those that did not. The number of people in some tribes
would increase but in others decrease, and this could produce
changes in gene frequencies over large areas.

Such examples as the invention of the bow could be cited
indefinitely. The great technical advances made in Europe
during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
cases in point. They increased greatly the power of the Euro-
peans both to expand into other continents and to grow more
food in Europe itself. They thus increased the number of peo-
ple of European stock and, in so doing, altered the genie en-
dowment of the human race.

All extreme human segregants, of course, are not beneficial
to the society that produces them. The particular combination
of genes which grew up to be known as Adolf Hitler, appear-
ing just when it did and under prevailing circumstances, had
an evolutionary significance which did not help its tribe at all.
It probably altered permanently the ratio of Teuton to Slav.
Likewise, the little group of men who seized control of Russia
has also changed the populations, and hence the genie fre-
quencies, in many stocks over a large portion of the globe.
The store of genes of the Baltic nations may well have been

54 Essays on Individuality

depleted in part through the extermination of their leaders
and their professional and educated classes. (The extermina-
tion of local leaders is, of course, a recognized technique of
establishing a foreign hegemony.) Many other effects of com-
munism upon biological evolution can be cited, such as those
produced by forced migrations and resettlement, and by the
liquidating of whole social classes. The differential butchery
of "bourgeois" Chinese by those now in power may well have
altered the genie endowment of the Chinese race. Another
form of totalitarianism also had its evolutionary effects in the
Hitlerian concentration camps— camps which lowered the
genie endowment of the world.

The role of the extreme Mendelian segregant in evolution,
however, should not be over-emphasized. It is only one factor
in a complex equation and certainly not the most important
factor. It is, however, an erratic variable and the complexity
of its functioning is so great that the effects can never be cal-
culated with any certainty. We can never tell in advance when
a Mendelian segregant might initiate a major change in hu-
man affairs and consequently in the genie reservoir of the sur-
viving population. At some time in the future, some new
religion may appear, some "holy" war may be fought or some
new fanaticism or ideology may break loose and destroy a
portion of mankind. Some few of the future Pied Pipers will
certainly have enough followers to become world-wide nuis-
ances and some may even affect the future of our species. Do
what we will, this erratic factor in evolution— this factor due to
the activities of individuals who are extreme Mendelian segre-
gants— will always be with us and will always defy our best
prognostications.

The role of the exceptionally able individual in our cultural
and biological evolution thus is not too difficult to discover.
But the discovery does not give us a complete picture. We still
have to investigate the factors which produce such individuals.

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 55

Before we can proceed with this task, however, we should
dispose of a completely bogus problem— that of heredity vs.
environment. As we know, statements made in the past that
either heredity or environment is more important than the
other are without meaning. To consider one as more impor-
tant than the other in producing any single individual is as
meaningless as considering the multiplier more important than
the multiplicand (or the reverse) in deriving a product. Both
heredity and environment are conditions of life and both have
an absolute veto power over all individual human achievement.
Detailed evidence for this statement cannot be given here but
the evidence is available to anyone who wishes to secure it.

The exceptionally able individuals— those whose cumula-
tive and cooperative efforts have created <3ur culture and who
now direct and control our collective acts— have never formed
more than a minute fraction of our species. Moreover, they
have never shown themselves able to reproduce their kind but,
on the contrary, their production, in each instance, is for-
tuitous and their total number, at any one time, variable. Yet
their continued existence is essential if our civilization is to
endure and if we are to preserve the gains we have made. Cer-
tainly cultural progress is impossible without the contributions
made by superior men. Thus it is only a truism to state that
the continued production of superior men is a necessary con-
dition for cultural advance in the future.

If we wish to contribute knowingly to our future well be-
ing, we shall have to identify and map the factors in our heri-
tage that enable us to produce such able individuals. The
problem before us is: How does our race manage to produce
individuals who deviate so markedly from the normal? To
answer this question we will have to examine the machinery
of heredity.

A recent and very useful device for exploring our hereditary
potential is to picture each breeding group, nation, or race as

56 Essays on Individuality

possessing a gene-pool or a genie reservoir. The pool or reser-
voir can be considered the joint possession of the group but
it does not exist in any one spot where it can be drawn upon
at will. In fact it exists only in fragments— only as particular
genie combinations in the germ plasm of the individuals who
make up the group. Nor can the individuals release or utilize
the desirable genes at will. No man even knows what genes he
himself carries, though his unique individuality is a product of
the unique combination of genes in the fertilized egg from
which he developed.

Equalitarianism cannot be extended honestly to these un-
known but variable combinations of genes. As we know, the
various mutant forms that our genes take are not all equal.
Certain forms of a gene (alleles) are far more effective than
others, both in their individual functioning and in their
ability to work in combinations with other genes. The fre-
quency of these effective alleles varies enormously from popu-
lation to population and also within populations, because
most populations are made up of groups that are partially
isolated reproductively. The frequency of the effective genes
is a major factor in the value of any gene-pool. Reservoirs that
have many such genes produce a relatively large number of
those genie combinations that can, under favorable conditions,
develop into superior individuals. On the other hand, if the
frequency of these genes falls too low, the gene-pool may fail
to produce able individuals. It may even fail to produce any-
one above the mediocre.

At this point it might be well to show how the machinery
of heredity produces extreme variants. This can be done most
simply by the use of a completely imaginary example as an
illustration. Let us assume that there are in a population ten
genes whose frequency is such that each one is possessed by
just half of those who make up the population. Let us suppose
further that these genes are equally beneficial and that the

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 57

more of them an individual has, the better off he is. Anyone
who has all ten genes then would be, potentially, a very su-
perior person. The proportion of such people in the whole
population would be 2"10 or 1 in 1024— a little less than .1 per
cent. Those who had any nine of the ten genes would consti-
tute about 1.0 per cent of the population and those who had
any eight would be about 4.5 per cent. If the population is
reasonably large, these percentages would be constant from
generation to generation.

Now let us assume that this population fuses with an equal
number from another population which has none of these
genes at all. (Here we should repeat that this case is purely
imaginary and probably applies to no human group.) The
occurrence of each gene would be reduced from 50 per cent
of the population to 27.14 per cent. (Not to 25 per cent be-
cause some of the original 50 per cent had a double dose of
each gene.) The proportion of those who have all ten genes
would be reduced from 1 in 1024 to about 1 in 461,200. The
able individuals (by definition) would thus be reduced by a
factor of over 450 and their number might well be reduced
below that necessary to keep a civilization functioning.

This illustration is much too simple to fit anything that
actually happens, because it leaves out all modifications due
to selective matings. In fact, it omits all complications. But
it does show how extremely susceptible all special genie com-
binations are to changes in the frequencies of the individual
genes that compose them.

We are now in a position to examine the genetic relation-
ship of the able and outstanding individuals to the breeding
groups that produce them. All relatively rare combinations of
genes— all extreme Mendelian segregants— must be hetero-
zygous in respect to the majority of their genes, because the
chance of rare combinations being composed of double doses
of each gene is too small to be of any significance. This means

58 Essays on Individuality

that such genie combinations cannot breed true. Our able
minority has such a genie formula and nearly all of them have
come from parents who were not outstanding. To produce
exceptionally able children it is only necessary that each parent
be able to supplement the other— be able to give to the child
the genes that the other parent lacks. This, incidentally, is only
a special case of hybrid-vigor or, what we call "heterosis"— a
recent genetical discovery that has increased so greatly the
production of our corn crop.

We should emphasize, however, that even if the uncommon
man arises from the commonality, all groups within the popu-
lation do not produce outstanding men in equal numbers and
we know enough genetics now to know that they could not do
so even if all cultural variables were smoothed out and all
opportunities were equalized. The extreme susceptibility of
complex genie combinations to slight variations in the fre-
quencies of individual genes would be sufficient in itself to
introduce a major variable.

So we come at last to the point where we can begin to ex-
amine the all-important interaction of the biological and cul-
tural factors that are responsible for the existence of outstand-
ing ability. Obviously, a proper genie combination is not in
itself sufficient to make a "great man." The tools of culture
must also be available to him if he is to accomplish anything
at all. If potentially able combinations of genes may occur
throughout the greater part of the population, then the avail-
able opportunities— the tools of culture— must also be dis-
tributed throughout the population. No nation can now afford
to inhibit the development of greatness in any of its poten-
tially able. The preservation of civilization itself— not to men-
tion its advancement— depends upon the activities of the able,
and the able, in turn, owe their very existence to the masses
of the mediocre who beget them. Here then is interdepend-
ence with a vengeance! Possibly the chief importance of the

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 59

common man lies in the fact that, without the aid of a cer-
tain fraction of his children, we could not advance or even
preserve our civilization.

One very important factor in the production of the able
minority remains to be described. In the illustration we gave
of the mechanism of heredity, a tacit assumption contrary to
fact was made. The union of the sex cells, which produced the
different combinations of genes, was assumed to be completely
fortuitous, such as that which occurs in wind pollination. Hu-
man beings could secure such a fortuitous fertilization only
by some artificial means such as having all the males contribute
semen to a sperm bank and having all the females inseminated
artificially. In the absence of such a silly practice, human re-
production will not be purely a matter of chance even though
promiscuity grows and, in the dark, all cats are gray. The in-
evitable selective mating of human beings will affect the vari-
ous combination of genes which constitute our gene-pool.

While marriage is proverbially a lottery, similarity in back-
ground, ability, taste, education, intelligence and social status
are powerful selecting agents. Whenever like mates with like
(genetically), the statistical distribution curve, which describes
the frequency of the purely fortuitous combinations of genes,
is flattened out, its mode is depressed, and its extremes are in-
creased. This reduces the number of the mediocre produced
and increases the numbers of both the sub-normal and the
talented groups. It is possible that, without this increase in the
number of the extreme variants, no nation, race, or group
could produce enough superior individuals to maintain a
complex culture. Certainly not enough to operate or advance
a civilization.

This factor of selective mating introduces a most erratic
variable into our cultural development and, over the ages,
even into our biological evolution. It is itself produced by the

60 Essays on Individuality

interaction of two other variables, the two whose existence is
recognized routinely, i.e., heredity and envionment.

We need not point out here that the character of every
individual is determined by the way his biological potentiali-
ties developed in his own personal environment. We are all
the product of the interaction of these two variables. But in
selective mating, heredity and environment interact on still
another plane. To a large extent the environment determines
who marries whom and, over the generations, the product of
the matings becomes a major factor in determining the all-
important cultural environment. This feed-back into each
other of our heredity and environment acting on at least two
different levels, introduces so many unmeasurable complica-
tions into our biological composition and into our cultural
heritage, that our future development will remain highly un-
predictable. We can be certain that our future will not be
static, but that is the present limit of our certitude.

Even minor changes in our present social conventions may
reduce the amount of the existing selective mating, and a
marked reduction may reduce the production of the talented
below some critical range. If this happens, we may expect a
cultural retrogression. In the past, any number of human cul-
tures have deteriorated and some of them have collapsed and
vanished. It would be silly, of course, to ascribe the retrogres-
sions simply to changes in the number of selective matings
within the several cultures. It would be just as silly to leave
this factor entirely out of our interpretations.

Any number of social customs have stood, and still stand,
in the way of an optimum amount of selective matings. In a
feudal society, opportunities are denied to many able men
who, consequently, never develop to the high level of their
biological potential and thus they remain among the undis-
tinguished. Such able men (and women) might also be dif-
fused throughout an "ideal" classless society and, lacking the

Some Biological Aspects of Individualism 61

means to separate themselves from the generality, or to de-
velop to the full their peculiar talents, would be effectively
swamped. In such a society they could hardly segregate in
groups. In fact, only a few of the able males might ever meet
an able female who appealed to them erotically. Obviously an
open society— one in which the able may rise and the dim-wits
sink, a society where like levels of ability segregate out from
the whole, and where like intelligences have a greater chance
of meeting and mating— has advantages that other societies do
not have. Our own society today— incidentally and without
design— is providing more and more opportunities for intelli-
gent matrimonial discrimination. It is possible that our co-
educational colleges, where highly-selected males and females
meet when young, are as important in their function of bring-
ing together the parents of our future superior individuals as
they are in educating the present crop.

Today we are in an evolutionary stage where our culture is
exceptionally complex, so complex in fact that it can remain
effective only through the cooperative efforts of the very
ablest fraction of mankind. Any change in the numbers, or
competencies of these few, or any social change which would
inhibit their adequate functioning, would have far-reaching
consequences. These few, however, cannot reproduce them-
selves, and their existence in numbers sufficient to keep our
culture operative depends upon Mendelian segregations from
the population as a whole. The number of such individuals
that any population can produce depends both upon the fre-
quency of the individual genes which are necessary for the
production of all able individuals and upon the degree of
selective mating within the breeding group. These are variable
factors and make for great instability.

But this is not all bad. We owe the speed and extent of our
evolution to our instability. A completely stable species simply
does not evolve. Instability, however, while it makes progress

62 Essays on Individuality

possible, always presents the danger of deterioration. The
only certainty we now have as to our future is that it will not
be stable.

Individuality and Modernity

by Richard M. Weaver

IN A WORLD WHICH HAS LARGELY ACCEPTED MODERNISM AS

its slogan, the status of personality becomes a matter of con-
cern to all who think reflectively and benevolently about the
human being. There is an uncomfortable basis of truth in a
remark I once heard made by a philosopher: | as soon as some-
thing begins to disappear, we put up signs proclaiming the
virtue of it^ The very fact of a symposium arranged to discuss
the future of individuality may be taken wryly as a sign that
its prospects are poor. But sometimes men disvalue a thing
only because they have forgotten how good it is comparatively.
In such cases a fresh look should lead to a revival of faith and
also uncover possibilities for preserving what we would be the
poorer for losing.

What I understand by "individuality" is the personality
vis-a-vis society and the state. Individuality is the sign of the
persona, and it always finds its claims in the higher sanctions
of the latter. Therefore, it seems necessary to say something
about the true nature of personality. In what immediately
follows, I shall describe a few of its aspects as they appear to
an observer from the humanities. If these do not add up to a
definition, at least they may help to determine in what sort
of soil and climate personality, in the sense desiderated, is
most likely to thrive and be respected.

It seems a threshold fact that personality is some kind of
integration. The individual whom we regard as having au-

63

64 Essays on Individuality

thentic personality appears to possess a center, and everything
that he does is in relation to this. When such a person per-
forms an act, no part of his being seems uninvolved; what hap-
pens on the outer circumference is duly controlled by the
integrating center. We sense, sometimes with a feeling of envy,
that this individual is a unitary being and thus "in possession
of himself." Of course, there are poorly integrated or disin-
tegrated "personalities," but these we classify as unformed or
degenerate just because they fall short in this property. The
true personality is a psychic unity, preserving its identity and
giving a sort of thematic continuity to the acts of the indi-
vidual.

I have observed in many instances that different personali-
ties possess different powers of insight into matters. A subject
which is obscure to one person may be clear and understand-
able to another, even when the "IQ" measurement of the
second is inferior to that of the first. A type of sentience open
to one individual is simply closed to another. The older I
grow, the more disinclined I am to disparage mental processes
which at first strike me as naive, foolish, or even illogical. I
can recall more than one instance in which an individual who
impressed me as quite naive proved to have a better grasp of a
situation than I had. Certainly some of the finest creations of
civilization have been produced by persons who were regarded
by their associates as simple-minded in some respects. The
mysterious formula of the personality may fit the individual
for unique insight and achievement in one direction while
leaving him below average in others. This is the real reason for
insisting that every man's view should have a chance for a
respectful hearing. The Creator seems to have given different
individuals different ways of cogently apprehending reality.

This selective relation of the person to the totality may
suggest that personality is the final ethical tie-up of the indi-
vidual. It is the special form taken by the individual in ex-

Individuality and Modernity 65

pressing the values he has recognized. When we speak of "the
sacredness of the personality," as we sometimes do, we mean
just this reflection through the person of ideas of the true and
the good. The fact that there are as many different expressions
as there are personalities need not mean that the reality is mis-
cellaneous. It may mean rather that we are faced with a re-
ligious concept, not open to the kinds of noetic formulations
that serve on other levels of knowledge. Any other conception
of personality leaves it a mere aggregate of peculiarities, and
the cultivation of the idiosyncratic is idiocy.

An indirect proof of this religious conception is found in
the ethical maxim that the greatest wrong one can do to a
person is to treat him as if he were only an instrument. To
treat him as an instrument is to treat him as though he had
no vision of the good to express through his particular stances
and actions. There are forms of regimentation, some in labor,
some in military service, and today perhaps a good many else-
where, which the general sense regards as brutalizing because
they strike down and keep suppressed any motion the indi-
vidual might make toward personal discrimination and evalu-
ation.

Our reasoning will not admit that the entire worth of a man
is in his instrumental servitude. If man has a right to person-
ality, along with the other rights that are being claimed for
him today, he must have an area of freedom to express, with
personal emphasis, his acknowledgment of the good. The per-
sonality is a morally oriented unit which has a duty to main-
tain itself against many forms of social coercion and also
against the sometimes greater danger of complacence. This
means a state of independence which makes the battle for
personality a basic phase of the battle for freedom.

I am in agreement with those who believe that personality
is on the defensive today, and I would go so far as to say that
in some cases it is the object of deliberate, directed assault.

66 Essays on Individuality

That is an accusation. To justify it I shall name a few of the
forces that seem to me most inimical to personality and shall
discuss their impact.

There is no question that technology and industrialism are
making it difficult for personality. Whatever may have been
the designs of the authors of the Baconian revolution, they
have produced a world in which it is increasingly hard to be
human in the normative sense. Man is an organism, not a
mechanism; and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm
to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free
rhythm. As a small but significant illustration: I have seen an
interesting conversation terminated because a member of the
party remembered that the parking meter by his car had about
run out.

Most of us today have to move to the sounds of bells and
whistles and to changes of light; we have to keep ourselves
tense so as not to miss these mechanical signals. There can be
disciplinary value in a certain amount of mechanical pacing,
but ours has gone too far, and servitude to the machine today
involves not just those who work in factories, but the great
majority. These pressures against human personality, however,
are visible to all and have been much discussed, so I shall pass
on to some insidious forces, which may be all the more dan-
gerous for being subtle and sometimes concealed.

First among these is the attack upon memory. There has
never been another milieu, as far as my knowledge goes, which
has sought to make forgetting a virtue. "Forget it" is a pass-
word of the time. If people make a mistake or commit a sin
(to use an antiquated phrase), they are told to "Forget it."
People are praised in our organs of greatest circulation for
discarding all baggage of the past and conforming to a "fast-
changing world." Those who live with a burden of memory
are smiled at amiably, when they are not frowned upon darkly,
as impediments in the way of progress. Everything is sup-

Individuality and Modernity 67

posed to be of the moment and for the moment. In our educa-
tional programs, history, which used to be a very sobering
discipline, has been dropped in favor of various scientistic stud-
ies of the human record, and that passionate sense of histori-
cal reality which is at the base of much cultural achievement
is actually discouraged. The mood of the individual and of the
group has become ahistorical.

I cannot see this disparagement of all memory as anything
but an attack upon the mind, which must have adverse effects
upon the personality. According to Joseph Jastrow, "Disorders
of personality involve more or less disorganization of the mem-
ory continuum and of the group of elements which enter into
normal consciousness of personal identity." x The human be-
ing must live in a present that is enriched and sustained by a
past; it is his experience stored up in the form of memory
which enables him to be something more than an automaton
responding to sensory impingements.

It is equally true that a man's personality is a product in
large part of the memory of things he has done, decisions he
has made, with their consequences, and so on. Personality can-
not be the creation of a moment, for one of the things we
predicate of it, with most confidence, is its uniformity. If Sam
Jones is known to have a certain kind of personality, we say
that in a given situation he will behave in one fashion rather
than another, which might be chosen by an individual of dif-
ferent personality. But unless Jones carries with him a con-
sciousness of what he has been, we can have no ground for
predicting the nature of his future choices.

By the same token, without this faculty of memory there
can be no such thing as conscience. Conscience is essentially
a recollection or pulling together of our ideas of what we are,
what the things we deal with are, and the structure of values

1 Joseph Jastrow, "Personality," Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy, and Psy-
chology (New York: Peter Smith, 1940), II, 284.

68 Essays on Individuality

to which we have in our inmost feelings subscribed. It is a
present awareness of many things which no longer have pres-
ent existence. Thus, when an individual consults his con-
science, he refers to a complex of remembered facts, insights,
and ideas of obligation— all of which by their very nature can-
not be manufactured out of a present moment. Conscience
thus requires a re-collection of the self, a thinking of who and
what we are before performing an act, and this is why medi-
tation and contemplation are enjoined by most religions.

The craze for "living in the present" is related to the fact
that the present is empirical time. It is the time we experience,
if by experience we mean sensation. The great wave of em-
piricism which has engulfed modern thinking has had, as one
of its logical effects, this discrediting of memory and denigra-
tion of the past. Its influence upon our very mode of thinking
can be very grave.

Consider for a moment what it means to invite the indi-
vidual to "live in the present." It means asking him to give
up his habit of associating things, and indeed, to give up hav-
ing any but the most superficial ideas. William James points
out that people who remember best are those who have con-
cept systems. A fact is rememberable when an individual is
able to make "multiple associations" with it. The concept
serves as a kind of frame upon which he hangs this and that
item. When a particular fact is called to mind, it may suggest
the framework and the framework in turn may suggest other
facts.

What I particularly fear is that this attack upon memory
may be a concealed attack upon all conceptualization, more
especially since intellect is now regarded by a school of edu-
cational theory as "undemocratic" in its relation with the
physical body. When we advise people not to remember, we
may be advising them in effect not to conceptualize. In other
words, "Don't think about it." Let the present trend of sensory

Individuality and Modernity 69

experience determine the attitude and the decision. Today's
mass journalism, with its lively propagation, its weak reflection,
and its addiction to sensational data, lends powerful encour-
agement to the habit.

It is hard to see how this cult of forgetting, or of living
entirely in the present, can avoid weakening the integration
which develops personality. There is truth in the saying that a
man is part of all that he has met— and I pointedly include
here the choices he has made with reference to the problems
that he has met. All of these experiences, active and passive,
physical and intellectual, coalesce in what I have been calling
his center, but what at other times has been called his soul.
When the individual destroys his memory, he destroys in part
his soul.

The fact that one has this kind of center means that one has
created something as a result of his effort in living. And this
something, nesting on "the presence of the past in the present,"
to recall a useful phrase of T. S. Eliot's, gives one a defined
character, or a self. If a man cannot remember what he did
day before yesterday, how can he know what he ought to do
day after tomorrow? And if, on principle, he should remember
what he did day before yesterday, he should remember what-
ever of significance he did a year ago and five years ago, for
there is no arbitrary point at which the past becomes dead.

It is even questionable whether those who claim to "live in
the present" are getting more out of the present than anyone
else. I agree entirely with C. G. Jung that denial of the past
is by no means the same thing as consciousness of the present,
and that "the really modern man is often found among those
who call themselves old-fashioned." 2 This is because those
who have well stored minds are able to live more knowingly
in the present. They are constantly making multiple associa-

2 C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search ot a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1933), p. 229.

70 Essays on Individuality

tions, and their very erudition, which memory makes possible,
becomes a means of wider sensibility. The idea of progress
itself involves retrospection and accurate comparison. The
pseudo-modern, who is an enemy of the past, is actually unable
to understand the nature of progress.

At the same time that this pseudo-modern temper is warring
against memory, it is also warring against status, with a similar
harmful result to the personality. We might call it a two-
pronged offensive aimed at the same goal.

I have not thoroughly tested the representation I am now
going to make, but it seems to me that man is happiest (in a
sense which would include spiritual happiness) when he en-
joys a kind of equipoise of status and function, or of being and
action. His status at any moment enables him to know what
he is (or who he is) and his function keeps him in relation
with the process of human activity. In other words, the man
of developed personality and achieved well-being is somebody
and can do something. When these two properties are in bal-
ance in the individual, the ensuing condition can be described
by that beautiful word euphoria.

An excessive inclination toward either status or function is
upsetting. To rely wholly upon one's status, to stay wrapped
up in it and suppose that it answers every need, leads to debility
and sterility. It is a condition often observed in decadent aris-
tocracies, and in any individual who has long been over-pro-
tected by status. It is not against this, however, that the present
age needs warning, for its excess lies at the other end. We have
gone to the extreme of attaching importance only to function,
while deriding the idea of status. The current feeling is that the
measure of man is what he does, and everybody is to be judged
by results, like baseball players or salesmen. At first glance
this has a plausible look; it seems honest whereas the other
does not, and indeed there are situations in which measure-
ment by accomplishment only is a very good corrective. We

Individuality and Modernity 71

like to see presumptuous or unfounded status rebuked, and
"functional" man seems to contribute more to the production
of things.

A more circumspective inquiry, however, will show that the
idea of status, while certainly capable of abuse, is an important
element in one's psychic well-being. It is natural and it is right
for a man to wish to be seen as something more than he is at
a random moment. He wishes to be known as an individual,
and individuality requires historicity. If he has by effort and
sacrifice won himself a position among men, that position is
part of his being; when you touch him, you touch it. When
you address him, you are not addressing merely the externals
of indifferently preserved flesh; you are addressing the man
within, who has achieved a state of being. At some point in
each life, owing to the inevitable ravages of time, one's func-
tioning efficiency is lowered. We do not subtract from the in-
dividual's honor in society because he can no longer run a
hundred yards in ten seconds, or perform the labor that he
could at thirty, or write poetry with the passion of his youth.
Rather, his achievements are listed after his name, and he is,
so to speak, emeritus.

But one of the main tendencies of modernism, if I mistake
it not, is to discount accumulated status, and to insist that the
only worth is that which is present and demonstrable_Xhe
philosophy of instrumentalism has lent theoretical support to
this notion.

The harm that is done to the individual thereby is this:
every person needs to have a sense of his place, or what is often
called a sense of belonging. A sure knowledge of status, I think,
confers this more than does anything else. Much of the sub-
conscious anxiety and feeling of lostness from which many
people suffer today results from this broadscale attempt to do
away with status, which is like doing away with home. Home is
the place where our status is known and duly respected. Change

72 Essays on Individuality

for its own sake, and function as the sole criterion, have
brought about a condition of mobility such that many people
no longer feel that they have a place, physical or spiritual. I am
inclined to think that pure function or activity, without a
backdrop of status, is meaningless. The small boy who puts on
a cowboy suit or a fireman's helmet shows that he wants to
function as something.

Just as the individual requires a balance of status and func-
tion for his real happiness, so it appears that he requires a
balance of outer and innerjife, Part of his life has a public
orientalioli7T>uT part of it does not. He has a private self that
looks inward, and he should be able to feel with some distinct-
ness the difference between public and private roles. It strikes
me that those eighteenth century individuals who wrote let-
ters to the newspapers, signed "Publius" or something like that,
were giving expression to this difference. When the writer ap-
peared before the public in the common interest, he was con-
scious of stepping outside his private considerations and enter-
ing into another capacity, of assuming a posture. The rest of
the time he was his own man, with his thoughts and feelings
reserved for himself.

Whatever barrier made this delicacy possible has long since
been broken down. It is now felt that the individual's entire
life is subject to public report and review. Any claim to privacy
is viewed as a form of exclusiveness, to be denied in the in-
terest of an onrushing democracy.

When a feeling becomes as pervasive as this now is, it finds
many manifestations. It affects, for example, even the archi-
tecture of our houses. We have all noted the vogue of picture
windows, which leave the family livingroom open to full view
and appraisal of the world. Even the interiors of modern
houses are so designed as to make it impossible for the indi-
vidual to withdraw and find privacy. The traditional refuge of
"a room of one's own," upstairs or to the rear, is no more.

Individuality and Modernity 73

All must be visible and together in "the democratic way of
life." Evidences like this are often more conclusive as to the
real trend of mentality than what we see reflected in our news-
papers and magazines.

One of the more extraordinary invasions of individual
privacy is the modem income tax. I am aware that this example
will appear ludicrous to some, yet I am convinced that it has a
very serious side. If we take a detached view and realize the
extent to which it places everybody under surveillance, we are
amazed at what it assumes. I am familiar with the arguments
for it on political and humanitarian grounds. What I am
pointing out is that this tax makes the individual's entire eco-
nomic and financial life subject to annual government audit.
It is just as if we were all criminals out on parole, required once
a year to file an affidavit of our doings before a public official.
The fact to be pondered is that arguments against the income
tax based on the right to privacy would be dismissed as trivial
or irrelevant. The claim to privacy would simply not supply
any leverage.

The decline of prjvflcy is traceable, to the best of my per-
ception, to a belief that man is or should be one-dimensional.
There should be no depths, no recesses, no area of being that
cannot be unfolded simply. Such a conception seems quite
in line with other attempts to simplify man through various
forms of scientific abstraction and to insist that he is "nothing
but" a thing that these techniques of exposition can explain.
If he were not that kind of thing, we might not be able to
manipulate him, and this thought is anathema to the positivis-
tic party. Since personality means depth and uniqueness, and
even mystery, it does not flourish on a plane. The abolition of
privacy does away with the very regions where personal con-
figurations must form.

Possibly the worst result of this one-dimensional concept of
the person is that it makes self-knowledge deceptively easy. In

74 Essays on Individuality

spite of the popularity enjoyed by psychology in recent decades,
it may be questioned whether men understand themselves any
better today than they did when Socrates was exhorting the
Athenians to examine themselves and to learn whether man is
a creature mild and gentle by nature, or a monster more terrible
than Typhon. Or, one might conclude that what psychology
has done to advance such understanding, political romanticism
and advertising propaganda have largely undone. The pressure
against the habit of contemplation and the displacement of
the humanities from a central role in our education have
worked against what are probably the two best means of get-
ting to know the nature of the human being. Self-knowledge
is an extremely difficult acquisition under the best circum-
stances, and I think no one has better expressed this truth than
Eliseo Vivas:

My experience in general inclines me to the belief that men
in general live their lives through without finding out who or
what they really are. We think we are courageous when we
are cowards, honest when we are cheats and thieves, truthful
and generous when we are liars and pigs, and self-respecting in
spite of the high coefficient of pliability of our moral spines.
... It takes a crisis to reveal to us what values we truly espouse,
and even that is often not enough, for each of us has his sys-
tem of jujitsu for disposing quietly of bothersome truths.3

If a person is satisfied with the externality of the self, and
if he gathers from the tone of current thinking that personality
is just so much moonshine anyhow, it is not likely that he
will take pains to search out the real springs of his attitudes
and actions. Actions that appear to him perfectly respectable,
or even the expression of benevolence, may become the cause
of suffering to others— suffering which the agent cannot appre-
hend because he has a false picture of much that is involved.

3 Eliseo Vivas, The Moral Life and the Ethical Life (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1950), p. 190.

Individuality and Modernity 75

Such failure may become collective, and what is true of the
individual in this regard may be true of the group or the nation.
The same want of self-knowledge and the same self-deception
regarding motives can lead nations into policies that create
enmity and produce suffering. A nation, too, may have a sys-
tem of jujitsu for breaking the holds of self-criticism.

I shall conclude this list of forces which are bringing about
a depersonalization of the individual with one or two from the
field of my professional work. Few will question the proposi-
tion that language is one of the means by which man expresses
himself most personally. But in this sphere, too, we can mark
the same tendencies toward over-simplification, and redefini-
tion with the apparent object of manipulating. I have in mind
especially the current fondness for something called "com-
munication." Communication is usurping the place formerly
held by expression. What used to be studied as an art, with
some philosophical attention to the character and resources of
the user, the truth of what was being expressed, and the charac-
ter of the potential audience, is now being stripped down to
a technique. Many would be surprised by the extent to which
this new subject is edging out the old courses in composition
and rhetoric in our colleges. The significance of the change
has been noted by Allen Tate in an apt sentence. "The word
'communication,' " he writes, "presupposes the victory of the
secularized society of means without ends." 4

In this paring down of expression to "communication" there
are two dangerous premises. One is that communication is
primarily an engineering problem, to be solved through resort
to the physical sciences. The problem is conceived as getting
certain sounds from one mouth to certain ears or of getting a
set of graphic symbols before certain eyes. This reflects the
obsession of the scientific linguists that language is nothing
more than a code, whose ends and means can be scientifically

4 Allen Tate, The Forlorn Demon (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953), p. 12.

76 Essays on Individuality

analyzed and dealt with. The intermediate stage of encoding
and decoding thus becomes the whole subject. Left out of ac-
count are the way in which language is expressive of value and
personality, and the way in which the use of it shapes and dis-
ciplines the mind.

The second premise is that the object of the communica-
tion is merely a passive registrar— a pair of ears or eyes ready
to absorb whatever is presented to them by our now marvelous
means of transmission. I shall go into Allen Tate's debt once
more, this time to quote an observation from his "Reflections
on American Poetry: 1900-1950." In this Sewanee Review ar-
ticle (Winter, 1956), he notes that there are "strong political
pressures which ask the poet to 'communicate' to passively
conditioned persons what a servile society expects them to
feel." If these forces are brought to bear upon the modern poet,
they are surely brought to bear much more strongly upon the
journalists and all who write for our organs of mass "communi-
cation." The extent to which they assume prior indoctrination
and docility on the part of their audience is amazing when one
goes to the point of analyzing it. Mass communication is not
conversation, and the obstacles in the way of a meeting of
speaker and hearer, in what might be termed a "man to man"
or "no nonsense" discussion, seem actually greater than ever
before.

This development will suggest that loss of belief in person-
ality is being reflected in language itself; and indeed, how else
could it be if, as I. A. Richards has said, language is "the su-
preme organ of the mind's self-ordering growth." 5 I have to
agree with F. A. Voigt that the English language today is los-
ing character, strength, and resonance. What I am chiefly
conscious of is the loss of resonance, and I think that this loss
is owing mainly to the fact that the modern style shuns any-

5 1. A. Richards, Speculative Instruments (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1955), p. 9.

Individuality and Modernity 77

thing suggestive of value. Or, if this generalization must be
qualified, it admits only values of the narrow, strident kind,
such as might be expected to survive after positivism has done
its work. There is even a theory to justify this narrowing down,
as can be seen in the curious attempts of people like Alfred
Korzybski and Stuart Chase to maintain that language ought
to be somehow correlated with the spatio-temporal order. Sym-
bolism and expression of emotion are both under attack as
irruptions from a non-scientific world.

If we seat a typical modern before a chapter of the King
James Bible, or a passage from an eighteenth century oration,
it is problematical how much of what is there he can get. The
wonderful wealth of pleonasm, metonymy, synecdoche, anti-
thesis, isocolons, anaphoras, inversions, and climatic orders—
a veritable orchestration for the soul— is, I believe, puzzling to
him. His reaction, I suspect, is that the writer of the passage
is saying it the best way he could, and must be pardoned, being
of a primitive time. The way to say it would be in the style of
Look, or of an editorial in the New York Daily News, with
words of flat signification, with syncopated syntax, and with
none of the broadly ruminative phrases which have the power
to inspire speculation. The essential sterility of such a style is
one of the surest signs we have that modern man is being desic-
cated. For the "modern" style is at once brash and timid;
brash enough to break old patterns without thinking, and
timid before the tremendous evocative and constructive powers
immanent in language.

There is a temptation to suppose that by doing something
to language itself we can do something about this situation.
Much as I would like to think that, reason tells me that the
opportunity is limited. Something will have to be done first
about man's representation of himself, because that represen-
tation broadens or narrows the vocabulary and the rhetoric
which he thinks he can use. But to the extent that language

y8 Essays on Individuality

exerts a counter influence upon the representation, we can
say that it is a causal factor, and we can do something through
force of example. It is very easy to pick up unconsciously a
tone, or to fall into a vocabulary, or to make use of figures and
analogies, whose implications are opposite to the views we
really hold. Any style moves along on a set of hidden or half-
hidden premises, and there is a great if unconscious pressure
to accept the premises of a style in popular use. These premises
now point in the general direction of a philosophic nihilism.
We cannot re-institute the style of an age that we feel to have
been more humane toward the personality, but we can, within
the idiom permitted us, avoid the kind of discourse that car-
ries just below its surface a contempt for all values.

This seems to turn the consideration toward remedial meas-
ures. One of the obvious steps, if we are to secure the future
of personality, is to clarify the relation of the individual to his
society.

It is quite easy to fall under the influence of our extensive
literature of protest and to assume that the individual is always
engaged in a righteous warfare with his society. In my view
this is not an accurate picture of the relationship. I believe
that there is a dualism of the individual and society, but that
the dualism is not necessarily, nor even normally, one of con-
flict. The two are complementary and mutually supporting,
and it seems idle to argue which is prior in order of time and
therefore prior in order of natural right.

When we speak of "the individual," we are dealing with an
analytic isolate, something abstracted from its context and held
up for convenience of study or reference. For all Whitman's
fine phrase, there is no "simple, separate person." The person
is always a person within his society, and although it probably
could never be proved which owes the other more, it is certain
that the individual is indebted to society for many things
which allow him to be an individual. He makes use of its insti-

Individuality and Modernity 79

tutions, its customs, usages, its settled preferences, and its
means of communication in order to express himself in his
own way; it is silly to think of being an individual alone in the
big woods or at the North Pole. Thoreau's individualism
showed itself in the rather long list of rejections of what his
society presented and his continuing satire of its assumptions.
This was his way of using what was offered; and we rejoice that
this society was healthy enough to allow him to take the pos-
ture he chose to take and still "include" him.

It would seem to me false, therefore, to picture our task as
always that of fighting the battle of the individual against any
society. In a normal situation, the individual and his society
are mutually sustaining in a complex, and while there will al-
ways be minor and incidental frictions, these will not be a
prime feature of the relationship. We may derive some pre-
scriptive guidance here from the principle that any sound
whole respects its parts. It is made a whole by its parts; it is
conscious of this, and it does not attempt to override them or
distort them. And the part owes a loyalty to itself as well as
to the whole; it must be itself in order that other parts may
be themselves.

Following this line of analysis, I am disposed to accept the
doctrine of Calhoun, which, roughly speaking, visualizes so-
ciety as an organism made up of organic parts. If the organ as
a whole is to function properly, the parts must be allowed to
perform their offices. The head must not fight against the
stomach or the arms try to take the place of the legs, and so
on. This provides reason for saying that the parts have an in-
violate character; they must be allowed to be what they are if
the whole is to carry on its unitary function. Furthermore,
there are some things the whole may not do without specific
concurrence of the parts, so that in some matters the part has
an absolute veto.

Taking this out of the language of metaphor and looking

80 Essays on Individuality

at society as a concrete thing, we can say that it has parts com-
prised of individuals and of groups and combinations of indi-
dividuals emerging out of some common interest or feeling.
These groups are constituents of society, and the state has no
right to disregard their needs and privileges, because in doing
so it would be working against its real end.

This principle contains the final rebuttal of totalitarianism.
The totalitarian philosophy assumes that the unit of the whole,
or the totality, has all the rights and that the constituent parts
either have no rights or have rights of an inferior order. On
the premise of this doctrine, there is no such thing as oppres-
sion of a minority; if a minority stands in the way of something
willed by the totality (as it would work out, by a numerical
majority), it is condemned by that very fact, and any means
whatever may be used against it.

This can be a form of government, but it is not a society in
any true sense, for society is a system of groupings which has
as its purpose the expression of the many needs, desires, and
inclinations that are found in a multitude of people, always of
course with due prevention of invasions and excesses. The
modern "mass" looks with hatred upon any sign of the struc-
turing of society, perhaps just because its own desires are form-
less and irrational. As Hannah Arendt notes in her exhaustive
study of totalitarianism, "Masses are not held together by a
consciousness of common interest, and they lack that specific
class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited,
and obtainable goals." 6 The individual has the best chance in
a society which permits and even encourages many different
centers of authority, influence, opinion, taste and accomplish-
ment. These things grow out of associations freely entered into
by persons of common necessity, interest, or geographical
habitat.

6 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1951), p. 305.

Individuality and Modernity 81

Something toward this end could be accomplished by draw-
ing more sharply the line between government and society.
The present tendency seems to be to dissolve society altogether
and make everything government. But government is the pro-
tector of society, not something identical with it. It is only in
the kind of spontaneous life that society lives that a person has
a chance to be an individual and to express himself personally.

For that reason the widespread present efforts to exterminate
the idea of class and independent association, and to override
all forms of particularism, are to be firmly resisted. Some of
them had their original impulse in idealism, real or perverted,
but their effect would be to freeze our imaginative, cultural,
and social life in a rigor mortis of bureaucratic domination.

Individuality and the General Will

by Felix Motley

POLITICS TODAY HAS BECOME THE ART OF RECONCILING TWO

continuously antagonistic forces— that of Individualism and
that of a General Will. The practise of this art is the more
difficult because the characteristic of Individualism unques-
tionably has greater reality than the concept of a General Will.
Yet the tendency of the times is to subordinate the fact of
fundamental human differences to the fiction of identical hu-
man purposes. This disconcerting paradox merits examination.

The idea of a Volunte Generate, as first developed by Jean
Jacques Rousseau two centuries ago, is not to be confused with
instinct. Gregarious animals on occasion act as though con-
trolled by a single cooperative purpose. So do migrating birds.
The same spontaneous unanimity is apparent among human
beings in periods of panic or passion. But Rousseau's theory of
a General Will, which is embedded in contemporary political
thought, is wholly distinct from collective action of an instinc-
tive, passionate, or capricious nature. It is the composite, at any
given moment, of the presumably rational judgment of all
mature and competent members of the group. The General
Will is therefore the whole of which the individual wills are
parts. Without individuality, in other words, there could be
no General Will, not even theoretically.

Conversely, it must be admitted, there can be no individu-
ality, except of a strictly physical nature, without some agree-
ment which tends to give a certain validity to the concept of

82

Individuality and the General Will 83

a General Will. There had to be mutual agreement to discuss
Individuality and Personality, for instance, before those sub-
jects could be examined from different viewpoints by those
composing even the present group. Our objective is to develop,
or at least discover, a composite opinion on the subject of
Individuality. Whether or not that goal is reached it is cer-
tainly clear that we consider Individuality incomplete unless
it leads to, or at least tacitly accepts, some form of generalized

agreement.

Undoubtedly the characteristics of Individuality and Per-
sonality can be found, and may to some extent be expressed,
without a social setting. The primitive anchorite, isolated in a
lonely cave, grubbing his own subsistence, is free from the
modifications of individualism that society necessarily imposes.
Man in the state of nature is indeed in a sense the only un-
trammeled individualist; the only independent and uncircum-
scribed personality. But what we really mean by individualism
is the latitude of a person to choose for himself among the
many fruits of a civilization in which he is an active participant.
It is in practise impossible to cut oneself off from the dis-
agreeable results of collectve action, while continuing to bene-
fit substantially from those regarded as pleasurable.

"Man is a political animal" who needs contact with his fel-
lows—in work and play, spiritual as well as material— for self-
fulfillment. On that point Aristotle said the last word. The
prolonged helplessness of human infancy; man's unique ability
to formulate and communicate abstract ideas; his desire as
well as his need to cooperate with his fellows— these and other
distinctive attributes combine to demand thai association
which of itself creates Society. And I think we must all agree
that social contact implies some form of that social contract
on which Rousseau placed such great emphasis.

The Social Contract may of course be implicit rather than

84 Essays on Individuality

explicit. It may be as simple and elementary as the convention
which allows the batter three strikes in a game of baseball. Or
it may involve a constitutional division of power so compli-
cated and refined that a Supreme Court must be established to
make the determinations. The Social Contract, again, may be
accepted willingly by citizens who have a voice in its applica-
tion; or it may be enforced by terrorism on unwilling subjects.
But these diversities, whether of importance or of acceptability,
are all secondary to the fact that the Social Contract is a
reality, and that no individual can with impunity ignore the
terms made applicable to him.

Nevertheless, eminent political thinkers, especially in Eng-
land, have since the French Revolution denied any validity to
the theory of the Social Contract. Sir Frederick Pollock, for
instance, calls it a "plastic fiction," while admitting sorrow-
fully that it "became one of the most successful and fatal of
political impostitures." Certainly it would be impossible to
prove that groups of naked savages ever covenanted with each
other to change the state of nature into an orderly political
society. But such evidence is not necessary to validate this part
of Rousseau's argument. There are many instances, in our own
history, where men confronting primitive conditions individu-
ally accepted generalized rules and regulations for cooperative
ends. The Mayflower Compact was one of these, and there
were many others during the colonial period.

These social contracts, however, were of limited scope. The
one drawn up by Roger Williams in 1636, for settlers in the
new town of Providence, specified that it should apply "only
in civil things." The novelty, and the danger, of Rousseau's
Contrat Social lay in its all-inclusive, totalitarian nature. No
aspect of human life was to be excluded from the control of
that General Will which Rousseau called the "essence" of the
Social Contract. His key sentence is worthy of careful attention.

Individuality and the General Will 85

Chacun de nous met en commun sa personne et toute sa
puissance sous la supreme direction de la volunte generate, et
nous recevons en corps chaque membre comme partie indi-
visible du tout.

It is important to explore some of the consequences that
follow inevitably from the assumption that everybody places
"his person and all his power under the supreme direction of
the General Will." Clearly the thesis suggests, as Rousseau
himself goes on to admit, that "whosoever refuses to obey the
General Will must in that instance be restrained by the body
politic, which actually means that he is forced to be free." To
many of us that still seems an impossible contradiction in terms
—that one can be "forced to be free." But it is a conclusion
that follows directly from Rousseau's premise.

In other words, a change in the character of self-determina-
tion is brought by the Social Contract. Through the agency
of this contract man passes from the state of nature to the
state of civilization. And in so doing he exchanges his natural
liberty for what Rousseau calls civil liberty. Or, as I think we
should put it in English, under the Social Contract man ex-
changes Liberty, which is an individual attribute varying in
its intensity and quality from person to person, for Freedom,
which is an artificial and external condition created, protected
and governed by social action.

Since our language is rich enough to possess the two words,
I think we should carefully observe the subtle but very real
distinction between them. Liberty is to my mind an individu-
alized spiritual aspiration, whereas freedom I regard as a gen-
eralized physical condition. As Rousseau suggests, many may
enjoy freedom when the personal liberty of some is sharply
restrained. And, conversely, one may keep the essence of per-
sonal liberty without freedom:

86 Essays on Individuality

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind,
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art!

It is impossible to disagree with Rousseau's argument that
Society must have rules, and that those rules inevitably en-
croach on personality. If I am playing solitaire in the Castle
of Chillon I am at liberty to cheat all I want and nobody else
is affected thereby. But if my freedom is enlarged to permit
me to play bridge with three fellow-prisoners, I must observe
the rules of the game. I must not slip myself an extra card in
order to win, for if I do the losers will very properly protest,
with a vehemence proportionate to the stakes involved. For
the freedom of a social game I have surrendered the liberty I
had at solitaire. And if you accept that homely illustration you
have gone a long way towards admitting that the Social Con-
tract, far from being "chaff and rags," as Burke called it, is an
inevitable consequence of social contact.

American political thinkers, instead of vehemently denounc-
ing the theory of the Social Contract, have been more inclined
to set limits to its exploitation by political rulers. That is
sensible. Where Rousseau can and should be criticized is for
equating Society and State, for setting up a mystical "General
Will" as sovereign power over both, and for then deceitfully
asserting that the sovereign himself is bound, like his subjects,
by this General Will. It follows that the clear duty of those
who believe in Individualism is not to attack the unchallenge-
able part of the Social Contract, but to oppose its extension,
through the now well-established myth of the General Will, to
every aspect of human life and thought. For while we can
afford to give up liberty temporarily in a social game, we can-
not afford to surrender it permanently to the State. This be-
comes more clear when we realize that the Social Contract
operates on these two distinct levels, which are differentiated
as society and state.

Individuality and the General Will 87

The distinction between the two was well defined and em-
phasized by Locke. His great influence on the Founding Fath-
ers helps to explain why the difference between Society and
State is still more readily recognized by Americans than by
Europeans. Essentially, Society is the voluntary cooperative
action of individuals in areas where the State is not concerned.
But these areas are always subject to contraction if the State
moves in to make cooperation compulsory. The rules of con-
duct laid down by Society and those laid down by the State are
in both cases binding and in both cases find their philosophic
justification in the theory of Social Contract. The essential dif-
ference is that the rules laid down by the State are legalized,
with physical force behind them, whereas the rules of Society
are primarily voluntary agreements and are better described
as conventions. He who violates a social convention is likely to
be ostracized, or excommunicated in the broad sense of the
word. But he who violates a State law or edict is subject to
imprisonment or even death.

On the moral scale, therefore, Society is a superior type of
organization, since its authority is based on individual agree-
ment rather than on external coercion. Morally speaking, it
is reactionary rather than progressive whenever the State ex-
pands its authority at the expense of Society. Social security,
federal aid to education, unemployment insurance, govern-
mental handouts, subsidies, and interventions of every kind,
not least so-called "mutual assistance" to allied governments-
all these, however dolled up in a specious humanitarianism, are
essentially reactionary measures, calculated to encroach on
voluntary goodwill. Put arithmetically, the taxes I pay to sup-
port the expanding galaxy of governmental welfare measures
diminish by just that much what I might contribute under the
prompting of my own conscience through associations and in
directions of my own choosing.

Rosseau's fatal achievement was not only to establish the

88 Essays on Individuality

so-called "General Will" as a political dogma, but also to con-
vince his followers that it is somehow in every respect superior
to the individual will, which in any conflict of opinion, in any
sort of undertaking, must give way. Clearly this theory, inte-
grated with coercion, involves a most cynical view of human
nature. It implies that no man can be trusted to "live a godly,
righteous, and sober life," no matter how needfully he may
incline to divine promptings. On the contrary, he must be con-
stantly and subserviently attentive to the orders of "Big
Brother," who by some perverted miracle and political hocus-
pocus has come to embody a General Will. This, as Rousseau
explained in very modern gobbledegook, may quite conceivably
be unenlightened in any given circumstance, but nevertheless
must not be questioned because tou/ours dioite. So the suc-
cessors to Stalin came to explain that they could not question
that dictator when he was wrong because he was then inter-
preting a General Will that is invariably right.

To understand how this pernicious doctrine ever took root
one must, no matter how sketchily, locate the place of Rous-
seau in the long history of Western political thought. Aristotle
certainly recognized the nature of the Social Contract. But he
was very careful not to adulterate it with any nonsense about
the General Will. "From the hour of their birth," he wrote,
"some are marked out for subjection, others for rule." More-
over, "this duality originates in the constitution of the uni-
verse." On this point Aquinas later elaborated effectively.

With Christianity came a more humanitarian, Vox Populi,
Vox Dei, conception of Social Contract. This broader concep-
tion became the charter of the Civitas Dei, from which slaves
and barbarians are not excluded. So far as possible, political
organization should also be in conformity with, or at least irra-
diated by, the teachings of Christ. Man-made law should con-
form to Natural law, the principles of which are discoverable.
And if this conformity is not always practical politics, then,

Individuality and the General Will 89

at least the conduct of religious society should be free from
control by the State. In Gibbon's opinion, it was the successful
assertion of this prerogative that crumbled the Roman Empire.

With the Reformation, and the subsequent rapid rise of
Nationalism, political thinking inevitably lost some of these
universal values, and despite the United Nations we have not
yet found the formula to restore them. Machiavelli is a perhaps
extreme example of the shift from idealistic consideration
to eminently pragmatic statesmanship. For him the Social
Contract was as mundane, as localized, and as limited a con-
cept as it had been for Aristotle. Similarly, as seen by Hobbes,
the ordering of the State was an essentially secular problem.
Milton, among the Protestants, stands out in this period for
his affirmation that: "Our liberty ... is a blessing we have
received from God Himself. It is what we are born to. To lay
this down at Caesar's feet, which we derive not from him,
which we are not beholden to him for, were an unworthy
action, and a degrading of our very nature." That thought pro-
foundly influenced the formation of American government.

But just before our Revolution came Rousseau, whose devas-
tating influence was to displace both God and chivalry at a
single push. His sovereign power— the General Will— replaces
divine authority with a hydraheaded monster not merely lack-
ing in divine attributes, but also safeguarded against both
Noblesse Oblige and any effective form of popular control.
Yet this most arbitrary of all tyrannies is called democratic, and
by the sheer emotional appeal of that dubious word brings a
quasi-religious fervor to all who lack a more spiritual form of
faith.

So it happened that the Social Contract ceased to be a self-
denying ordinance and became instead a deceptively disguised
instrument of oppression. We have not seen the end of it, for
the "People's Democracies" of the Soviet world are the direct

90 Essays on Individuality

and logical outgrowth of Rousseau's conception of an unques-
tionable "General Will." And the religious, but anti-Christian,
fervor of modern Communism owes much more of its prosely-
tizing strength to Rousseau than to Marx.

If the theory of the General Will had been voiced by itself,
instead of being cleverly tied in with the valid conception of
Social Contract, it would scarcely have survived, let alone
prospered, as is the case. The major fallacy is too obvious. In
the last analysis some ruler must interpret and promulgate
what is assumed to be the General Will. The more sacrosanct
this popular desire, the more authoritarian must be the power
of those entrusted with its realization. A single, unified popular
will implies a single, unified governmental purpose to make
the will effective. This is the road to dictatorship; not to what
Americans mean when they speak of democracy.

Yet the theory of the General Will can fairly be called
democratic, and is indeed closely allied with democracy as we
habitually use the soporific political term. Every adult who
subscribes to the General Will thereby acquires citizenship and
every citizen enjoys an equal voice in any elections that are
permitted. There is absolutely no discrimination— except
against those who do not admit the premise. They, of course,
are outlaws and worse than outlaws.

In rejecting the fiction of the General Will these dissenters
have also rejected the fact of the Social Contract and are there-
fore not merely noncitizens but also self-defined enemies of the
community based upon the Social Contract. As at least poten-
tial traitors within the body politic they deserve, and will quite
likely get, extermination. By the same token, however, adher-
ence to the doctrine by somebody under another sovereignty
makes him concitoyen, who should if possible be liberated
from bondage. Burke, in his Letters On A Regicide Peace,
estimated one-fifth of the influential people in England and

Individuality and the General Will 91

Scotland to be "pure Jacobins/' more loyal to revolutionary
France than to their own country. Burke clearly saw that Rous-
seau's doctrines demanded French action to liberate these
British Jacobins from British rule.

This international aspect of Rousseau's democracy, taken
over in toto by the Communists, has had a great appeal for
idealists who are properly appalled by the narrowness and
bigotry of flamboyant nationalism. A system which simul-
taneously promised emancipation at home and brotherhood
in foreign relations could not fail to exert much influence, es-
pecially on youth. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," en-
thused the youthful Wordsworth at the outbreak of the French
Revolution, "but to be young was very Heaven!" Much the
same rosy anticipation, in due course, was aroused by the "Ten
Days that Shook the World" from Russia.

But the application of the General Will, as distinct from
its theory, must always lead to disillusion, both from the na-
tional and the international viewpoint. Rousseau would give
all conforming citizens the vote and further insists that they
should participate actively and continuously in politics. He
did not observe that since the General Will must come to a
precise conclusion in any particular issue, and since this con-
clusion is by definition the only one then tenable, therefore
any permanent division of the electorate along party lines be-
comes intolerable. The party that represents "The People"
must not only dominate, but must extinguish all opposition to
its program.

Moreover, the tendency towards a single-party system is
strengthened by Rousseau's mistrust of parliamentary govern-
ment. Like the Physiocrats before him, Rousseau disliked di-
vided sovereignty. In place of an absolute monarch he en-
thrones the General Will. In practise this means an equally
omnipotent executive differing from the king only in being
more demagogic and less assured of tenure. And to retain his

92 Essays on Individuality

supremacy against upstart rivals the spokesman of the General
Will must ruthlessly cut them down. The only valid political
party is the one which gives the ruler unquestioning support.

So the implications of Rousseau's doctrine explain the
bloody chaos in the later stages of the French Revolution,
where no single man prior to Napoleon was able to hold the
dictatorship long. Mutatis mutandis, it explains the abomina-
tions committed by Mussolini, by Hitler, and more intelli-
gently by the Communists. In all of these cases the theory of
the General Will demanded the liquidation of any effective
Parliament and the organization of a single fanatical party
pledged to obey the Fuehrer. The greater success of the single-
party system in Russia would seem to be partly due to the
better corporate discipline of the Communists and partly to
their organization along international lines, which Rousseau
himself would have strongly approved.

If the concept of the General Will brings dictatorship in its
train at home, the result in foreign relations is no less certainly
a continuous threat of war. The nearest approach to unanimity
in the thinking of a community is always found when an en-
emy is present or effectively portrayed, so that any absolute
ruler is likely to bolster his position by asserting that the
security of the nation is threatened. Beyond that, the spokes-
man of the General Will can promote a crusading and mis-
sionizing fervor among his people— to bring the truth to those
with less enlightened government. The leaders of this Mes-
sianic movement may, of course, formally renounce all con-
quest or imperial rule, in keeping with their always humani-
tarian pronouncements. This was Robespierre's position early
in the French Revolution, as it was Lenin's when Communism
gained power in Russia. But the dynamic is too strong for
such self-denial, even if sincere. Soon the armies move out—
not to conquer of course, but to "liberate." Thus international

Individuality and the General Will 93

stability is doubly disturbed— not only by the danger of aggres-
sion, but by the feeling that "preventive war" may be the best
way to resist a threat which is psychological as well as physical
in nature.

We can now see why Rousseau is rightly regarded with
abhorrence by all who realize that individuality cannot prosper
under the constant threat of total war. While claiming to set
men free, the ideas of this warped genius have actually served
to promote a climate of slavery more threatening and more
widespread than anything found in pre-revolutionary France.
To attribute the monolithic State entirely to this one neurotic
personality would of course be overdrawn. As well hold Hitler
solely responsible for World War II. But what we do find in
the doctrines of Rousseau is the evil seed from which, with
cultivation, the brambles of modern totalitarianism have
spread. Voltaire summed it up very fairly, when he wrote to
thank Rousseau for a presentation copy of the latter's Dis-
course on Inequality. "I have received your new book against
the human race and thank you for it," said the great cynic.
"Never was such cleverness used in the design of making us
all stupid! One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all
fours."

The inequality of men, this early study by Rousseau main-
tained, "is the first source of all evils." The wild assertion is
elaborated and embroidered in The Social Contract, published
in 1762. One might therefore conclude that the first of the
"self-evident truths" proclaimed in our Declaration of Inde-
pendence, fourteen years later— "that all men are created
equal"— was inspired by Rousseau. But there is no confirmatory
evidence. Jefferson does not appear to have been influenced by
Rousseau until he went to France as Minister, after our Revo-
lution but prior to the much more formidable upheaval there.
Moreover, so far as the notes of Madison and others show,

94 Essays on Individuality

Rousseau's ideas were never once cited during the proceedings
of the Constitutional Convention, where Montesquieu and
Locke were both frequently quoted. The same is true of the
Federalist papers.

Since the very word "democracy/' in the political sense of
unfettered majority rule, was then anathema to most Ameri-
cans, this is not surprising. Discussion of a hypothetical Gen-
eral Will would have been academic, to say the least, when the
immediate problem was the formation of a General Govern-
ment with any real power over the virtually independent States.
A Federal Republic was all that was anticipated by the most
determined early nationalists, like Alexander Hamilton and
John Marshall. The protection of minorities against the ma-
jority was the inspiring and historically unique objective of the
Founding Fathers. And if anyone at that time had suggested
the desirability of a unified General Will, to be defined and
exercised throughout the States from the seat of central gov-
ernment, he would have been denounced more roundly even
than was poor bumbling George III.

Nevertheless, it is a matter of record that the French apostles
of Rousseau, if not the master himself, soon came into high
favor in the United States. A good deal of the adulation show-
ered on Citizen Genet, when he arrived here as Minister of
France three months after the guillotining of Louis XVI, was
doubtless inspired by anti-British sentiment; some of it was
probably just the indigenous American naivete which would
today give Bulganin and Khruschev a thunderous welcome if
they were allowed to come. Some of these Genetics, if our
biologists will pardon me, were due to Jefferson's decidedly
francophile influence. But after all such discounts are made
there is no doubt as to the underlying democratic surge, which
burst forth in many places, and in many forms more dangerous
than the poetic effusion from cultured Boston:

Individuality and the General Will 95

See the bright flame arise,
In yonder Eastern skies

Spreading in veins.
'T is pure Democracy
Setting all Nations free,

Melting their chains.

Far more serious, and worthy of recollection in these days
of Communist cells, were the Jacobin Clubs which, with the
open support of Genet, sprang up in all our seacoast cities.
When John Marshall went to France, on the famous X Y Z
Mission, he was told by a deputy of Talleyrand, then Foreign
Minister, that "the French party in America" would not
tolerate any arrangement with the Directory— in settlement of
just American claims— in any way burdensome to revolutionary
France. The then extraordinary influence of Rousseau's disci-
ples in the United States is given lengthy consideration by
Senator Beveridge, in his famous biography of Marshall, and
can there be readily reviewed.

But this American Jacobinism, significant though it was, ran
contrary to the establishment of an American "General Will."
It worked against, rather than with, those who like John
Marshall desired the establishment of a strong central govern-
ment. To their last member the Jacobin Clubs over here sup-
ported Jefferson and opposed the Federalists. These clubs were
the basis of Jefferson's Republican Party, which took that name
partly to signify its sympathy with the revolutionary Republic
of France. When Genet was ousted, and the almost treason-
able activities of the Jacobin Clubs were exposed, they logically
changed their name to Democratic Clubs. There is certainly a
lineal connection between the Jacobin Clubs of the seventeen
nineties, the later Democratic organizations like Tammany
Hall, and the A.D.A. of our own day. Rousseau, in short, is to
be regarded as the real progenitor of modern democratic
theory, in its "liberal" as well as its totalitarian form.

96 Essays on Individuality

A paradox that demands interpretation is illustrated by the
fact that the Jacobin Clubs, which served in France to con-
centrate political power, were in this country organized to re-
sist a similar concentration. The political units that we call
Nations have varying cultural backgrounds and social customs.
Consequently the theory of an immanent General Will, when
imposed on one country, will follow a somewhat different line
from that which it would take in another country. In our own
time the theory of the General Will has been the starting
point for the rise of Fascist Italy, Falangist Spain, Nazi Ger-
many, and Communist Russia. In all of the first three, though
with differences between them, the General Will was made
the tool of a relatively parochial Nationalism, which of course
was a strong factor in the French Revolution also. The role of
Karl Marx was to emphasize that the international, communis-
tic aspects of the French Revolution— the contribution of rela-
tively forgotten men like Morelli, Babeuf, and Buonarroti-
was really more vital than that of Mirabeau, Danton, or Robes-
pierre. Of course Rosseau's incendiary ideas could most easily
evolve within the confines of a national state, and through the
control of a single government. In theory, however, they were
thoroughly international. And we must realize that the estab-
lishment of a General Will in a single powerful country is
a sure preliminary to its attempted establishment for all man-
kind.

For the General Will in practise necessarily becomes the
will of the Executive that has been able to seize power. And
if it is to be internationalized this Executive cannot permit the
triumph of a rival General Will in another country. Therefore
the country that gets a running start in this direction, as did
France in 1792, or Russia in 1917, must work against Na-
tionalism in other countries, although of course it may as a
tactical matter temporarily promote Nationalism in a colonial
area. The vehicle for this subversive intrigue is the local revolu-

Individuality and the General Will 97

tionary group, loyal to the alien idea and not to the institutions
of the country where it operates. And the task of this group is
fundamentally to promote the General Will for which it
works, and to oppose the development of any possibly hostile
indigenous General Will. Thus the Jacobin Clubs in this coun-
try did their by no means trivial best to oppose the growth of
American Nationalism at the time of the French Revolution,
and thus the very similar Communist Clubs, or "front" or-
ganizations, are today actively opposed to the development of
American Imperialism, which could so easily clash with that
of Russia.

I have concentrated on the French Revolution, the endur-
ing significance of which is all too little appreciated by Ameri-
cans today, because it is so important for us to understand the
long evolution of the present-day opposition to individualism.
The fundamental threat, from the individualist viewpoint, is
the theory of the General Will. As Rousseau so clearly pointed
out, this means conformity, not merely in the terms of a spe-
cific social contract which leaves personality inviolate and in-
deed protected, but rather in the terms of an all-inclusive,
over-riding political obligation under which everything is ow-
ing to Caesar and nothing to God. In every field of life and
thought loyalties are being increasingly secularized and within
this narrowing compass man is now trapped as within that
fiendish medieval instrument of torture— the Iron Maiden.

He struggles, naturally. Individuality and Personality are
far too deeply rooted to be exorcised by the mere wave of an
egalitarian wand. But these struggles seem to be increasingly
pitiful and futile, like those of an animal hopelessly trapped.
The youngsters "rock 'n roll"— what horribly expressive terms-
while their parents seek almost as feverishly for some sort of
anodyne. If there is anything that can be called a General Will
it is the desire somehow to escape from the conditions that
the figment of a General Will imposes. But though we may

98 Essays on Individuality

rocket over our super-highways, in cars of ever-increasing speed,
and power, and danger, still every road is overshadowed by the
bomb. "In the event of an enemy attack this road will be
closed."

And triggering the bomb is the grip of this absurdly-named
General Will, becoming ever more generalized at the expense
of helpless individuals. Some think they can oppose this con-
cept, as now expressed from the Kremlin, by creating a contrary
General Will centralized in and directed from the White
House. But this, of course, is the counsel of despair. It is the
concept of the General Will as such that is the enemy of
Individualism. If we are to cope with that enemy, before it
overcomes us wholly, it is time to realize that the word Democ-
racy, used in a political sense, is simply Rousseau's monster
garbed in currently fashionable dress. To say that the will of
the national majority shall prevail, in every subject from the
determination of profits and wages to the conduct of educa-
tion, is merely to underwrite this dreadful fallacy. For the will
of the majority is as specious as the General Will from which
it is derived. Even when intrinsically desirable it cannot in
many fields be made effective. Of course every wage earner can
be guaranteed ten thousand dollars a year, but what will those
dollars then buy? Of course every youth can be given what
may be called a college education, but what will be its content?

Men are created equal, in the sense that all have much the
same basic needs, and in the sense that all are to be regarded
as parties to whatever social contracts their communities may
see fit to adopt. But at that point the line is drawn. To say that
men deserve equal opportunity is tacitly to admit that with this
opportunity they will become unequal. Some will push ahead
while others will stay behind. "From the hour of their birth,"
to return to Aristotle, "some are marked out for subjection,
others for rule." That biological fact can be concealed by
sophistries, but cannot be successfully denied. Moreover, no

Individuality and the General Will 99

system of government, least of all the alleged democracies,
can prevent those who collect the taxes from dominating those
who pay the taxes. The most that the ideal system of govern-
ment can do is to insure that those who have the taxing power
possess it only provisionally, and within clear-cut limits. Under
such a system true individuality can flourish, because it is pro-
tected from the tyranny of the General Will.

Where political power is concentrated and unlimited, as it
must be under the theory of the General Will, the unscrupu-
lous are always likely to rise to the top. Those who recognize
and cherish the infinite variety of human nature are by that
fact alone estopped from issuing glib commands in the name
of "the people." Here and there, for a brief period, a philoso-
pher-king, a Marcus Aurelius, may emerge. But the odds are
enormously against him, and in favor of the Neroes. It is of
course bitterly ironical that starting from the assumption of
human equality we move so easily to the conclusion of the one
indispensable man. But that is merely another way of saying
with Plato that the constant tendency of democracy is to slide
into dictatorship.

For Americans, the picture is especially poignant, for in this
country and in this country alone was it carefully planned to
keep political power diffused, and therefore to promote the
individual as well as the general welfare. The validity of the
Social Contract part of Rousseau's political philosophy was
admitted and indeed affirmed— by writing a Constitution in
the name of the people which was eventually ratified, on the
fulfilled understanding of a specific Bill of Rights, by all the
States. But the theory of the General Will was completely
rejected and repudiated, not only by establishing a govern-
ment with powers balanced between the executive, legislature
and judiciary, as advocated by Montesquieu, but also by with-
holding all but enumerated powers from the central govern-
ment as a whole. "The powers not delegated to the United

ioo Essays on Individuality

States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States,
are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

This system, still nominally in being, would seem to mean
that the fiction of the General Will, and its dreadful realiza-
tion in the form of totalitarian democracy, could never take
root in the United States. The majority will could be binding
only in the field of delegated powers, and even there many
specific restrictions were applied. "No bill of attainder or ex
post facto law shall be passed"; "No money shall be drawn
from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made
by law"; "Congress shall make no law respecting an establish-
ment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"; "No
person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a
witness against himself . . . nor shall private property be taken
for public use, without just compensation."

A political system in which the majority will is so carefully
hemmed about and circumscribed cannot with any accuracy
be called a democracy and should never be called a democracy
by those who take the oath of allegiance to the Constitution.
Those who wish to destroy the Republic, and build a unified
totalitarian dictatorship on its ruins, will naturally want first
to spread confusion as to what our form of government really
is. Yet we find people of unquestionable patriotism asserting
that our system is precisely what it seeks to avert.

Everybody who has convictions would of course like to see
his convictions prevail. There are Roman Catholics who in their
hearts would like to see their faith a State religion here, as it is
in other countries. There are legislators who suggest, if they do
not say openly, that Communists should not receive the protec-
tion of the Fifth Amendment. There are officials who argue that
money should be withdrawn from the Treasury, for top-secret
purposes, without prior appropriation. All that is only human,
for very few minds are broad enough to see any problem in its
full setting and it is always easy to believe that one's own opin-

Individuality and the General Will 101

ion on any subject is more enlightened than that of the other
fellow.

But let the dyke of Constitutional guarantees be broken at
one point, which you approve, and very soon the torrent will
gush through elsewhere, very likely over the terrain that you
yourself would most like to see protected. Give any viewpoint,
no matter how worthy, a monopoly and others will very shortly
claim the privilege. A free market, with truly competitive con-
ditions, is as important in the field of political ideas as in that
of commodities. And Socialistic controls in the latter will very
shortly be paralleled by Socialistic controls in the former.
Then, as that highly disillusioned Communist George Orwell
informed us, we are in 1984. Then Soviet Russia has conquered
us, whether or not the bomb is ever dropped.

The effects of two total wars have made the world all too safe
for that totalitarian democracy which follows naturally, even
inevitably, from Rousseau's doctrine of the General Will. And
the disease will not be eradicated until and unless its virulent
germ is isolated and defined. In doing this individualists of every
variety should make common cause, for whatever their individ-
ual bent it is menaced by the intolerable conclusion that, since
men are all equal, the sumraum bonum is a dead level of stand-
ardized mediocrity. Doubtless that material level can be raised,
under Communism as well as under Capitalism, to provide
everybody with tiled bathrooms, electric gadgets, and chrome-
plated automobiles. But men will never catch true happiness by
herding like sheep down the blind alley of purely physical satis-
factions.

It is not difficult to demonstrate that the doctrine of the
General Will underlies the belief that the majority is necessarily
right, and that in political practise this belief means that de-
mocracy leads directly to dictatorship. The inevitability of that
sequence, clearly foreseen by the men who wrote the Constitu-
tion of the United States, has been suggested here. What is not

102 Essays on Individuality

so apparent, but at least equally important, is the spiritual, as
well as political, stultification to which the theory of the Gen-
eral Will is sure to lead. By its innate hostility to individuality
of every kind, this General Will represses the personal contri-
bution to better living into mass conformity. The result, for
human beings, may be a very efficient, functional, and even
architecturally beautiful ant-hill. But it can never have the qual-
ities of the Civitas Dei.

As a political expedient, carefully safeguarded against tyran-
nical action, the device of majority rule has much to commend
it. When the argument is over and the vote is taken, we can
get on with the particular business, for better or worse. The
danger comes when we convert the mere expedient of limited
majority rule into the brazen idol that we call democracy; which
Rousseau called the General Will.

"Man is born free," complained this enemy of the human
race, "yet everywhere he is in chains." After two centuries of
experience with his remedial formula it is high time to reverse
the aphorism. "Man is born in chains, yet under a government
of limited and divided powers he may still be free."

Individuality vs. Equality

by Helmut Schoeck

TO ASK A SOCIOLOGIST FOR A CONTRIBUTION TO A SYMPOSIUM ON

individuality is like asking a professional soldier to contribute
to a symposium on pacifism. Sociology, or the science of soci-
ety, for its very raison d'etre had to ignore individuality, and
has always done so with a vengeance.

Of course, this is studied ignorance for the sake of specific
knowledge. Not a few sociologists, however, extend this episte-
mological ignorance of individuality to ontological absurdity, as
I shall document later.

For the greater part of this paper I shall step outside of the
field of sociology, in order to look at it critically.

As long as sociology treats of individuals, or groups of indi-
viduals, as essentially equal units in the cognitive act, aimed at
a specific sociological problem, it is legitimate. We could have
no systematic knowledge in any field without epistemological
acts of ruthless categorization, or shall we say, equalization.
This does not harm the individual as such.

After all, five hundred paintings of five hundred individual
beauties by great and individual artists hardly suffer simply be-
cause, for specific classification, they all come under the rubric
of "portrait." Scientistic equalitarianism becomes a threat to
individuality, both in social theory and in policy based thereon,

104 Essays on Individuality

only after confusing epistemological equality or identity with
ontological equality.1

A long time ago, man discovered that to have a science of any
area of observable data we must treat unique phenomena as if
they were identical. But this is valid only for the purposes of
the particular science of a particular field.

Taking things as equal— mentally— in order to investigate
them as units in a series, in order to study their structural simi-
larities and causal relationships, should not be confused with
treating these things as equal ontologically. But many social sci-
entists have done exactly this to their units of study, which are
men. Here, they are quite unlike the physician who keeps, as a
rule, prognostic and diagnostic statistics apart from his clinical
approach to unique individuals. Nor does the physician try to
remake the individual according to a statistical average.

In the statistics of the demographer, even of a cultural de-
mographer, the individuals of a given population are, by and

1 It seems that sociologists have given up more and more what Lester F. Ward
called pure sociology and have imbued their work with what he called applied
sociology. As Ward defined it, "pure sociology is simply a scientific inquiry into
the actual condition of society." We have now reached a point where pure
sociologists, e.g. Kingsley Davis, are attacked for the impediment of (pre-
sumably) applied sociology through their work in pure sociology. (Cf: the con-
troversy between K. Davis and M. Tumin, American Sociological Review,
August, 1953.)

Many American sociologists today behave as if Ward's definition of applied
sociology would have to cover all of their work. They are no longer aware of
the difference between epistemological and ontological equality. I suspect that
the borderline was rather thin even with Ward. He wrote: "Applied sociology
differs from the other applied sciences in embracing all men instead of a few.
Most of the philosophy which claims to be scientific, if it is not actually pessi-
mistic in denying the power of man to ameliorate his condition, is at least
oligocentric [This is an interesting term for the sociologist's professional crime
of paying attention to individuality!] in concentrating all effort on a few of the
supposed elite of mankind and ignoring or despising the great mass that have
not proved their inherent superiority ... it may be said here that from the
standpoint of applied sociology all men are reallv equal." (Italics added.)
Lester F. Ward, Applied Sociology, 1906, p. qf. Karl Mannheim approvingly
discussed the assumption of "ontological equality of men" in the social sciences
in his essay on "The Democratization of Culture," Essays on the Sociology oi
Culture, 1956.

Individuality vs. Equality 105

large, naked numbers only. A similar position is held by the
consumer in the economist's tables. Otherwise there could be
neither demography nor economics. It does not follow, how-
ever, that— as wartime or socialist rationing laws and coupons
always tend to do— consumers must be treated, in their individ-
ual act of consuming, as if they were equal units. This peculiar
notion, inherent in centralistic economies, leads to such actions
as the criminal prosecution and punishment of two consumers
who innocently exchange their ration-card coupons, e.g., a non-
smoker trading his tobacco coupons for the chocolate coupons
of a smoker who doesn't care for candy. Both in Britain and in
Germany this self-assertion of individuality in the act of con-
suming was classified as a criminal action during World War II.

A pragmatic conceptual equalization of unique phenomena
ought not to become an ontological equalization when we deal
with human beings.

This confusion of epistemological equality of human beings
with ontologically normative equality, leads some sociologists
and anthropologists to thinking that they are engaged in scien-
tific work when actually they may do little more than ask people:
"Don't you worry about your inequality?" or "Why don't you
demand equality with everyone else?"

These social scientists, I am afraid, are on par with the
physical anthropologist who might inquire whether the short
members of our species resent the advantages of tall ones, or
ask the bald males whether or not they feel insecure in the pres-
ence of those who boast a full mane. What would be thought
of medical doctors who would ask the crippled, the blind, the
toothless, whether they see the difference between their own
bodies and those of others?

Many a teenager's ego suffers a worse and more lasting blow
on the day he finds he must wear spectacles than on the day he
discovers his school is restricted to his range of I.Q. Shall we,
therefore, compel the entire population to wear spectacles, so

106 Essays on Individuality

that the deficient will not feel inferior? It may yet come to this.
The welfare state principle of "giving" all citizens equal old-age
pensions, irrespective of need, is based on exactly this motive.
To remove the sting of inequality from the provision of public
support, all must be made to accept it, no matter how wasteful
this system.

The present confusion in social science is even greater than
so far indicated. While pushing epistemological "equalitarian-
ism" into the realm of human ontology, the very same sociolo-
gists, it seems, do not dare make all of epistemological equality
that could be gained by applying this principle consistently and
vigorously.

By this complaint I mean the following. A great deal of con-
temporary research in social sciences, especially in sociology and
social psychology, is probably a fantastic duplication of effort.
Survey after survey, small group study after small group study,
is being carried out. But few are the scholars who dare draw a
line after the nth small group study and declare that from here
on each repetitive study will simply duplicate what we already
know. In other words, these scholars do not see fit to proceed
along the assumption of a reasonable identity of human behav-
ior under given circumstances, though this assumption would
allow them to get off the merry-go-round of pure induction.

Our social scientists tend to postulate a strange and unprov-
able equality of human nature and human potentialities when
it comes to basing social (welfare) policy on social science. This
is the confusion of epistemological with ontological equality.
Yet the same scientists, their practical equalitarianism notwith-
standing, refuse to assume enough of identity of situational
human behavior to get out of the rut of endless research dupli-
cation.

Professor George C. Homans of Harvard is certainly one of
the more moderate among the empiricists. Yet my point here
comes out quite strikingly in an article of his in the American

Individuality vs. Equality 107

Sociological Review of December, 1954. He says: "I shall de-
scribe briefly a study of the ten girl 'cash posters' in an account-
ing division of a certain company, and it formed part of a study
of the division as a whole, which I carried on from December
1949 through April 1950. Since it deals with only one group and
that group had only ten members, it can hardly hope to estab-
lish general hypotheses about small group behavior. Several such
studies, made with comparable methods, might hope to do so,
and they would provide the indispensable background to more
macroscopic studies of worker behavior, made by question-
naires. But by itself the present one can only be called a case
study of the relations between repetitive work, individual be-
havior, and social organization in a clerical group."

If this is all Dr. Homans has learned after spending several
hours daily for several months with ten girls in one room, no-
body but the Ford Foundation can help him. At least he should
be able to generalize about all females of our species in small
working groups. But if our social scientists show such reluctance
to generalize and predict where it would seem so reasonable,
how can we trust their assertion that the basic equality of hu-
mans warrants equalitarian social policies?

Individuality, rightly understood, is incompatible with the
ideal of "equality of opportunity."

Harold J. Laski, in his book, The American Democracy (1948,
p. 718), declared:

. . . No one has yet been able to make a successful frontal
attack on the idea of equality. From the time of John Adams
. . . social theorists in America have sought ways and means of
undermining its place in the American tradition ... in the
end, the strength of the egalitarian traditon has been profound
enough to leave it as the central thread in the American
tradition.

108 Essays on Individuality

Laski might well have quoted from letters Justice Holmes
wrote him between 1927 and 1930:

I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems
to me merely idealizing envy. . . . Some kind of despotism is
at the bottom of the seeking for change. . . . Nonetheless do I
repudiate the passion for equality as unphilosophical and as
with most of those who entertain it a disguise for less noble
feelings. ... I don't know anything about the right of every
man to an equal share on chances. ... As to the equality busi-
ness I don't see any ground for your aspirations in the pros-
pect of improved economic conditions for the many. . . .
What I can see more clearly is the desire to get rid of a dis-
agreeable contrast in position and public esteem— a desire for
which I have little respect.2

The sort of equality Laski advocated never prevailed in all
spheres of life in this country. For one thing, "equality" has too
many different meanings. This probably has reduced its political
effectiveness. As Daniel J. Boorstin wrote recently, in his The
Genius oi American Politics (p. 176):

. . . Take our concept of equality, which many have called the
central American value. No sooner does one describe a subject
like this and try to separate it for study, than one finds it dif-
fusing and evaporating into the general atmosphere. "Equal-
ity," what does it mean? In the United States it has been
taken for a fact and an ideal, a moral imperative and a socio-
logical datum, a legal principle and a social norm.

The United States became the economically most prosperous
nation precisely because over here equalitarianism in practical
life rarely meant equality of conditions. Foreign socialist critics
are aware of this. In 1949, Lord Lindsay of Birker observed that

2 Holmes-Laski Letters, edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe, 2 volumes, 1953, pp.
942, 1089, 1101, and 1272. The correspondence contains many additional
critical remarks by Justice Holmes on "the equality business." They can be
easily found through the excellent index.

Individuality vs. Equality 109

democratic equality in America was "thought of as the right of
anyone to become unequal. It is an equal right to inequality."
Apparently our more emotional spokesmen of equality now-
adays more and more ignore or simply fail to comprehend this.
Often they seem to press for legislation which at the same time
would compel movement toward equality of condition and
equality of opportunity to become unequal in the process. Such
a confusion could only create chaos.

Our professional equalitarians are not as unchallenged as Mr.
Laski suggested. In current scholarly literature, in social as well
as biological sciences, there is an increasing opposition to equal-
ity as a legitimate goal and norm. Outstanding scholars express
grave misgivings about equalitarianism and what attempts to
enforce it may do to a society. When isolated findings and
thoughts are integrated they will show that individuals as indi-
viduals do not want to live in a truly equalitarian society.

It is true, however, that to a greater or lesser degree in all
societies the life of the individual is always in a delicate balance
between individual self-assertion and fearful submission to the
imaginary collective. Probably that has always been the case. In
preliterate as well as in complex societies the individual is sub-
ject to control by other individuals due to the construction of a
mythical entity: the "whole society."

If reformer A would say to invidious individual B, "Desist
from conspicuous consumption because it irks me," he would
neither impress B, nor would he gather much support from
indifferent members of the society. But if the reformer suc-
ceeds in making people believe first in such an entity as "so-
ciety," he can subsequently graft his own wishes of social con-
trol on that anonymous body. The theologian John Bennett
well expresses this type of thinking when he writes that: "Eco-
nomic activities should be undertaken for the sake of the whole
society, and economic power should be under the control of
the whole society."

no Essays on Individuality

With very few exceptions, which were years of economic
growth and innovation, the periods of human history have seen
individuals labor under the controlling myth of a "whole soci-
ety." So we tend to forget that mankind's emergence from stere-
otyped and stagnating ways of life, on low subsistence, has
exclusively depended on the emergence of independent and
enterprising individuals, in various fields of endeavor, who had
enough resistance to escape from social controls which were
usually imposed in the name and interest of "the whole society"
or nation.

The rise and ever wider impact of social science, undoubtedly
has helped to recreate an intellectual climate in which men are
apt to forget that "society" cannot make demands on individ-
uals that are justified by supra-individual knowledge. In Individ-
ualism Reconsidered, David Riesman recently wrote: "Social
Science . . . led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their
being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to
that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay
. . . since we arise in society, it is assumed with a ferocious de-
terminism that we can never transcend it . . . [such concepts]
. . . destroy that margin of freedom which gives life its savor
and its endless possibility for advance."

How can individuals break through the social controls of
"society"? The concept of good and bad luck is, apparently, one
cultural definition for that purpose. Some cultures (tribes) lack
the notion of good and bad luck (for instance, the Navaho In-
dians). In such societies it is extremely difficult for individuals
to enjoy the fruits of differential faculties, insights, motives,
and, of course, of good fortune alone.

On the basis of an extensive study of this particular problem
I am inclined to say that, among other things, in a given cul-
ture it is precisely the lack of a strongly embedded notion of
good and bad luck which keeps societies on the lowest possi-

Individuality vs. Equality m

ble level of subsistence. Economic growth, a rising standard of
living, acceptance of innovation in agriculture and sanitation,
all call for the concepts of good and bad luck. They are a form
of internalized social control on aggressive resentment which
functions both in the successful and in the failures.

We should not assume a dichotomy between the favored few
and the multitude of failures. In the sense that there is only one
President of the United States, one of GM, and one of Har-
vard, virtually all of us may consider our lives only a partial suc-
cess. The concept of good and bad luck serves a function for
every member of a given culture. It not only bridges the gap be-
tween aspiration and achievement but also makes vertical mo-
bility and individual innovation psychologically tolerable. Even
those already fairly high up in the socio-economic structure
need that belief. Very few indeed will ever attain so philosoph-
ical or religious a position that they can place their lives in
tolerable perspective without the concept of good and bad
luck. A mere extension of so-called equality of opportunity
cannot assure perfectly adjusted people who regard each other
as complete equals. Somewhat belatedly in Great Britain this
is dawning even on radical proponents for equalitarian social
change.

In so "progressive" a journal as The New Statesman and Na-
tion (August 14, 1954), for instance, there was examination of
the question whether or not maximization of equality of educa-
tional opportunity may not be even more dysfunctional than
some old-fashioned relative injustice. A social survey, Social
Mobility in Britain, edited by D. V. Glass of the London School
of Economics, aimed at discovering the extent to which people
move up or down the social ladder, or remain stationary upon
it. Part of the investigation consisted in obtaining ten thousand
life-histories revealing mobility between the generations, and
the relationship between this mobility and such factors as
marriage and education. One of the most striking implications,

112 Essays on Individuality

which recurs constantly throughout the book, is that within a
couple of generations there may be "perfect mobility" except
for the few attending fee-paying schools— if there are any left.
"But what will happen then? What will equal opportunity really
mean?" asks the reviewer in The New Statesman and Nation.
Professor Glass suggests this possibility:

The working out of the Act through the three-fold system
of grammar, technical and modern secondary schools will by
no means minimize the disadvantages of the new unstable re-
lationships between successive generations. On the contrary,
the more efficient the selection procedure, the more evident
these disadvantages are likely to become. Outside of the pub-
lic schools, it will be the grammar schools which will furnish
the new elite, an elite apparently much less assailable because
it is selected for "measured intelligence." The selection proc-
ess will tend to reinforce the prestige of occupations already
high in social status and to divide the population into streams
which many may come to regard, indeed already regard, as dis-
tinct as sheep and goats. Not to have been to a grammar
school will be a more serious disqualification than in the past,
when social inequality in the educational system was known to
exist. And the feeling of resentment may be more rather than
less acute just because the individual concerned realises that
there is some validity in the selection process which has kept
him out of a grammar school. In this respect, apparent justice
may be more difficult to bear than injustice.

Thus, we see that any approximation to "equality of opportu-
nity" (a really complete one is impossible) is probably more
disruptive of human relations than the inequalities of the past
and present. Professor Glass warns that lack of adequate social
research did not prevent the passage of the 1944 Education Act,
which could destroy the democratic society which paradoxically
produced it.

Why did we not have such research? And why, currently in

Individuality vs. Equality 113

America, is there more research designed to find out how to
produce an equalitarian society than there is research asking
whether such a society is possible? It should be a warning that
even The New Statesman and Nation is forced to ask whether
the desire to produce a society of equals will not "simply end
in one which is just as rigidly stratified on an I.Q. basis as it was
once by birth."

It seems that only the existence of unequal external opportu-
nities makes it possible for the unsuccessful individual to live
with himself. As long as unequal chances are known to exist,
failure can be blamed on external conditions, rightly or wrongly.
But how can the individual think well of himself, how can he
face relatives and friends, if I.Q. tests and personality factors
alone have determined his place in society? Social scientists,
pushing men into unrealistic aspirations to, and beliefs in, ir-
rational "equal opportunities" may actually produce the frus-
trated human beings whom they like to explain as victims of
the present social system.

It will probably be granted that prestige, power, beauty, love,
and a host of other goods and values cannot be "redistributed."
But what about "economic equality," frequently demanded as
a step toward providing more equal distribution of the less tan-
gible values? Possibly the claim for economic equality is as irra-
tional as are the others.

To date no one has found a way to measure it. Carrying eco-
nomic equality by law to any conceivable approximation, let
alone to perfection, would wreck any known type of human so-
ciety. Can we even aim at relative economic equality, as a vague
goal to guide our policies? Recently, two American authors
have tried to make a case for it. Robert A. Dahl and Charles E.
Lindblom devote more than five hundred pages to outlining a
socio-economic system moving ever closer to equality.3 First

3 Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom, Politics, Economics, and Welfare,
1953-

H4 Essays on Individuality

they call "equality" a key value on which everybody ought to
agree. Later they attack reliance on incentives because "it
might easily produce such inequality as to demoralize a popula-
tion rather than develop desirable incentives."

These authors propose "income distribution toward more
equality [as] desirable on three grounds: for subjective equal-
ity, for political equality and stability, and as an investment in
resources." 4 However, toward the end, they write: "Few people
in the United States would have the temerity to advocate in-
equality and imbalance, even though they might mean by these
words precisely what the advocates of national bargaining mean
by equality and balance." 5

In short, Americans are so awed by the mere word "equality"
that meaningful discussion is no longer possible. Little wonder
that Dahl and Lindblom offer continuously contradictory state-
ments, for example: "Of course political equality is never at-
tained in the real world." And then: "Our own preference for
political equality is based upon a psychological want and a stra-
tegic calculation that may well be applicable to general equal-
ity. But unfortunately, general equality is almost impossible to
define."

They admit that in a highly inegalitarian society individu-
als are likely to feel better (as was suggested by the above men-
tioned study in Great Britain). They think correctly (p. 48) that
"class identification limits the guilt felt by an upper class toward
an inferior and the envy felt by an inferior class toward upper
classes." Why then are the authors dissatisfied with a condition
common to every known human society? Dahl and Lindblom
quite candidly answer: "One cannot be at all sure that he
would be among the elite to whom the advantages of inequality
would accrue." 6

Ubid., p. 138.
5 Ibid., p. 506.
« Ibid., p. 48.

Individuality vs. Equality 115

At this point, a quotation from Bernard Berenson may be
illuminating:

Unfortunately, jealousy is not confined to sex. It will be
hard to get the better of it in persons who resent every in-
equality that does not suit their heart's desire. . . . Resentment
is unhappily at the bottom of more social discontent than eco-
nomical difficulties. When these last are overcome, as in the
course of time they may be, inequality of physical make-up,
of mental and moral gifts, will remain and fester in many
natures.7

The motive of jealousy in Dahl and Lindblom's equalitarian-
ism is suggested by their claim that "income goals cannot be
met by a larger national income without further equalization."
Why? "Almost no one in the United States, for example, lacks
income for sufficient dental care. Yet large numbers of people
are convinced they cannot afford it. . . . The explanation is, of
course, that social standards and pressures compel them to turn
their expenditures in other directions." 8

Will Dahl and Lindblom solve the dilemma? On page 147
they say that: "No one can 'solve' the problem of the best dis-
tribution of income." Yet on page 158 they assert: "Given time
for recruitment of new generations of management ... an ade-
quate supply of vigorous, imaginative management can be had
through much smaller differentials in money income than those
now prevailing." Also: "If certain occupations could not be
filled, it would be those in which the work was undesirable or
the status low. Hence differentials needed for occupational mo-
bility would be reversed. Today's low paid jobs would be highly
paid."

This book by Dahl and Lindblom is a recent and voluminous
pleading for equalitarian policies. The dubiousness of this sort

7 Rumor and Reflection, paragraph selected as a memorable citation in the
New York Times Book Review Section.

8 Dahl and Lindblom, op. cit., p. 146.

1 1 6 Essays on Individuality

of economic and political writing is finally indicated in the au-
thors' conclusion: "Not only are we— and, as we believe, others
—unable to demonstrate the 'ultimate Tightness' of these values
[equality, 'rational social action,' i.e., a planned economy], but
we cannot even demonstrate conclusively that the characteris-
tics of man and social organization make these values attainable
enough to serve as relevant social goals." 9

One of the most dangerous tendencies in contemporary
thought is the attempt to drive a wedge between maintenance
of individuality and private property. The latter always must
include the freedom to lose as well as to gain. An inconsistency
of so-called "progressives" is that they advocate freedom to hurt
oneself for children, but deplore that freedom for adults in eco-
nomic life.

Sometimes, collectivists define individualism almost exclu-
sively as the freedom to be bohemian:

Individualism and individuality: A final ambiguity in the
problem of individualism remains to be faced. Usually, "indi-
vidualism" is used in American discourse, particularly in po-
litical argument, to refer to economic endeavor and enterprise.
It connotes striving in some self-reliant and relatively unfet-
tered (particularly by government) way for achievement and
success, in short, the acquisitive urge. This notion is not iden-
tical with what we may call "individuality"— the right to be
"one's self," to develop one's own individual personality as far
as possible according to one's own values and tastes, to be dif-
ferent, to be a nonconformist, to dissent from orthodoxy if
one thinks it necessary, in short, the right to diversity.10

Private property is inextricably linked to human individuality.
We can find no evolutionary principle in man's attitude toward
private property and its linkage to his individuality, privacy, and

9 Ibid., p. 517.

10 The American Social System by S. A. Queen, and others, 1956, p. 459.

Individuality vs. Equality 117

concept of personality. Some writers point to primitive prop-
erty sharing, but for every preliterate form of communal prop-
erty there are off-setting instances of pronounced individualism
in regard to property. To infer from a particular custom of in-
definite lending, or actual sharing, that it is somehow natural
to man to have a communal attitude toward property is about
as realistic as to conclude that American office mates are com-
munists because they share dictionaries, newspapers and paper
clips. Perhaps just because we have shifted our concern with
property to larger and more important things, we can afford to
be lax toward communal use of office stamps or garden tools.

Primitive man, however, extends his personality especially
into small items of property about which we would hardly worry.
Parry reported from the Lakher in India "that the most danger-
ous thing to leave in another's house is a closed basket contain-
ing . . . money. When the owner comes to fetch [his basket] . . .
he must give the owner of the house a fowl to sacrifice to avert
the danger of threatening him."

Why? We have a casual visitor who forgets his brief case in
our home. He is neither a Soviet diplomat, nor a physicist in an
atomic plant, but an ordinary fellow working on his own income
tax return and carrying around his notes for this worthy pur-
pose. When he returns to pick up his brief case, there will be
an uneasy moment. We will wonder whether or not he thinks
we did or did not pry. Either way, it will be embarrassing to
both parties. Among the Lakher, the forgetful visitor has to pay
damages for having inflicted this emotional pain on his host.

This shows how well recognized the sphere of privacy can be
even among very simple people. It also suggests that no matter
how crude their economy, such people view each other not as
equals but as very distinct individuals. In fact, among many
simple tribes, each member is thought to possess the faculty of
impressing his unique individuality or personality, like a seal,
on every item of property, on any discovered fishing spot, in

n8 Essays on Individuality

short, on anything he may deem valuable to him. He leaves his
sign and the thing or place is protected from all fellow tribes-
men. We no longer have such magical powers, except that our
children may on occasion protect a piece of cake from their
siblings by putting some of their saliva on it.

In short, it would seem that the prime notions of privacy,
individuality, and personality are essentially independent of the
level of civilization and complexity of social organization at-
tained.

The so-called acquisitive urge is practically universal among
men. Complete lack of property is for man, at all times and
under all known cultural conditions, an extreme situation. Prob-
ably, the universal consciousness of private property is linked
to the universality of sexual jealousy. Personal property and
gain are essential supports and shields of the basic family unit.
To expect man to surrender his acquisitive urge is to expect
him to give up his possessive attitude toward wife and children.
It would seem that those American theologians whose collec-
tivism induces them to pick from anthropology what they
think supports their view on the unrelatedness of private prop-
erty to human nature, have not only falsified anthropological
data but also by implication attack the universality of the
family. It is significant that the only truly equalitarian com-
munities in our present world, certain villages in Israel, operate
under a system that keeps children from the day of birth until
age eighteen in communal nursing homes with the express pur-
pose of extirpating the notion of private property.

We should ask whether equalitarianism in contemporary
mass democracies will be self-limiting, whether it will come to
a rest after reasonable additional economic equalizations? I
doubt it.

Not long ago, a candidate for the doctor's degree, filled with
passion for equality, submitted the first draft of a doctoral dis-

Individuality vs. Equality 1 19

sertation, parts of which were concerned with cultural engineer-
ing in the United States. Among other things, the young man
seriously proposed a supreme cultural planner. One of the
tasks of this bureaucrat would be to arrange for social conditions
assuring every American "equal sensory experiences of esthetic
objects."

Somehow, it was unbearable for this student to live his invid-
ious life of a genuine connoisseur in a society where a great
many, as he suspected, cannot differentiate between art and
trash. In other words, he felt as guilty for his unique (individual)
sensory and cognitive esthetic experiences as he did with regard
to his family fortune.

This encounter showed me with terrifying clarity that the
threat to individuality in any equalitarian system is always in-
finite and never self-limiting. That young man, devoted to the
religion of equality, had come to propose a scheme which would
doom nearly all the values and artistic possibilities for which he
stood.

In principle, this problem arose in a controversy between T. S.
Eliot and Harold J. Laski almost ten years ago. Laski contended
that in his society of equals the lowliest laborer would grasp all
of Beethoven, which leaves open to question why he should go
on digging ditches instead of teaching music. No matter how
ridiculous these ideas may seem, there is no reason to take
lightly the actuality and danger of aggressive envy on the part
of that population segment which cannot, or will not, experi-
ence the esthetic values held by a minority.

I shall never forget a conversation I overheard in Germany
during the Third Reich. It was after a performance of Puccini's
La Boheme at the Munich State Opera. The house had been
well filled with common people, and as I was walking home I
heard two young women, in front of me, have this exchange:

The first: "Did you understand that? Did you have any fun
listening to that crazy music and singing?"

120 Essays on Individuality

The second: "No. Not at all. You know, I really hated those
people next to us who looked as if they enjoyed that sort of
thing. It must be great to be like them."

The first: "Don't worry. They don't understand it either.
They just pretend. I am sure of that."

These two factory girls, or perhaps typists, had been told by
national-socialist indoctrination that all Germans must have an
equal share of the cultural heritage (proffered free of charge).
The only way to reconcile their own deficiencies with the doc-
trine of equality in the Volksgemeinschaft was to doubt the
differential experience of the others.

Hitler, probably in compensation for his own early failure,
had become an equalitarian dictator of art. Individual deviation
was anathema. The whole German people was to be molded
into an audience of equals, compelled to enjoy, or at least at-
tend, a limited repertoire of approved esthetic forms. Conse-
quently, any expression of esthetic criticism had to cease also
since it would have been an insult to the whole society of "equal
connoisseurs." To some extent, Hitler had achieved what our
young liberal American graduate student so hopefully desired.
There simply is no single field where equalitarianism will not
lead into blunt totalitarianism.

Now, it could be that some German connoisseur, afflicted
with similar social cowardice or "conscience," sitting next to
the factory girl sent to the opera on a free ticket (the cost de-
ducted from her wage), felt less guilty for his own individual
cultural experience just because he rubbed elbows with her. But,
as my observation would suggest, he was not thus safeguarded
from the envy and hatred of one with a more limited range.

Alexis de Tocqueville again and again exposed the dangers of
progressive equalitarianism to the American Democracy. At-
tacking it, he explained that the almost irrepressible emotion of
envy is stimulated under democratic conditions, especially if
the gifted few in a society are committed to delude the "com-

Individuality vs. Equality 121

mon man" with false notions about his inherent capabilities. If
people are equal politically, then how can they endure their re-
maining inequalities? Pondering on this dilemma, Tocqueville
clearly foresaw the new despotism, the rule of mediocrity, the
demand for "less for all."

T. S. Eliot's play, The Confidential Clerk, in my view is a
wonderful satire about the goal of equality of opportunity. Actu-
ally, the goal is unattainable. Yet such an admission would be
untenable for present day intellectuals bound by the unwritten
rules of modern social science research. When I read Brooks At-
kinson's review in the New York Times I began to understand
the special reason why this play irked most drama and literary
critics in America.

The theme of The Confidential Clerk can be found in the
following lines:

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms
Upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.

Now let's see how these lines fared under fire of Brooks At-
kinson's equalitarian attack. After opening night, he wrote:

The Confidential Clerk has to do with inherited characteris-
tics and a man's duty to accept his place in the world. ... It
takes a lot of patience and study to discover what Mr. Eliot is
saying by indirection, he looks so bland and mild on the sur-
face. And if, by chance, he is saying that everyone should be
satisfied with his lot in life, it is possible that many of us do
not want to hear it.

Apparently Mr. Atkinson did not. A few days later he wrote
aboutthe new play:

[I take] the liberty of concluding that Mr. Eliot means to
say: we should be resigned to our lot in life, we should accept
the terms life imposes on us and "adapt ourselves to the wish
that is granted." This is a rather chilling thought. It eliminates

122 Essays on Individuality

struggle and rebellion. It encourages docility. Despite his
benignity and modesty there is a chilling side to Mr. Eliot's
acceptance of established authority.

Not at all. Eliot said, "If you haven't the strength to impose
your own terms . . ." Obviously, he felt that only in such case
ought we to accept what is in store for us. What Eliot ridicules
is the dogma that a parental monetary situation and equal edu-
cational opportunities are the major factors making for success
or failure in a man's life. Eliot emphasizes the primary power
of hereditary factors, which are uniquely and unevenly scattered
among mankind.

Everything seems so simple as long as we assume that men
are born with equal endowments of intelligence and emotional
stability. Some time ago, I heard a Yale professor urge his
graduate students to accept the necessity of a welfare state
"because all people are born with about the same innate
chances for success in life." This would suggest that only the
income of the father is the deciding factor in whether child A
is to become President of Yale or whether child B is to end his
career as a bum. T. S. Eliot's sociology appears closer to reality.

B. Kaghan, the accidentally lost son of the lady in Eliot's play
—despite the most unfavorable circumstances in his early life-
is portrayed as a rising man of means, who, nobody in the play
seems to doubt, will end up as a rich and influential alderman
of London. On the other hand, Colby actually is the son of
lower-class parents with inferior faculties. His mother smuggled
him into the educational opportunities of a rich man's son. This
woman symbolizes the Socialist who exploits the sentimental
and unfounded guilt feeling of the wealthy for doing en bloc
what Colby's mother did with her own son. But the moment
Colby learns of his real origin, his aspirations shrink. He shows
full contentment with his modest lot, freely chosen by himself.

Individuality vs. Equality 123

That kind of contentment is a state which equalitarian social
scientists must ignore and deny.

Finally, what is "Equality of opportunity?"

Is it possible to distribute property in such a way that say, at
age eighteen, the sons of a university president and the sons of
a dock worker would have the same chances in life, as far as
economic and social status are concerned? Of course not, as a
modicum of psychological insight tells.

To be the son of a well-educated family means to have a cer-
tain number of implicit educational opportunities; also it means
to know educated and professionally advanced people. This is
one of the reasons why, again and again, collectivists sneer at
the institution of the family. It simply does not tie in with the
ideal of equality.

In order to give every individual the same chance, and no-
body a better one, the government— for one thing— would have
to prevent A from having a better credit rating than B. Other-
wise good luck, close study of legal loopholes, initiative, risk-
taking, and persistence will make rich men even under today's
taxes. But credit ratings are also linked to individual character
traits.

All this leads to a frightening conclusion. Literal equality of
opportunity could be accomplished only by eradicating the
memories and personality traits of each individual at a given
age. If you could thereby remake men into identical atoms of
society, the equalitarian might at last be satisfied. And it was
exactly this naive mechanistic view of man in the eighteenth
century from which the ideal of equality emerged.

Perhaps, if the proponents of equality by "leveling" continue
to have their way, an obligatory electroshock treatment plus
lobotomy for every young person reaching a certain age will
become standard procedure. Today, this is still mere satire.

In J. B. Priestley's recent play, Take the Fool Away, in a

124 Essays on Individuality

Utopia somewhat similar to Orwell's 1984, the authorities sub-
ject individualists to lobotomy. These "lobos" are then harm-
less robots, working for the state and laughing only when
induced to do so by a special injection. But it would not be
the first satire to evolve into grim reality. The agents are ready.
Last year I had a talk with the director of teacher education
in one of our universities. This jovial gentleman confided his
greatest worry to me: "You know, our graduates, after four years
of indoctrination in our program, go out from here with pretty
much the same attitudes they had when they came as fresh-
men. I really think we ought to get permission to electroshock
them."

Individuality and Its Significance
in Human Life

by Roger J. Williams

BEFORE EMBARKING UPON A DISCUSSION OF INDIVIDUALITY, IT

seems desirable to delineate just what is meant by the term. To
the writer, in the present context, it means: the possession of
distinctiveness byjnembers of the human family. Yet consulta-
tion or rive leading dictionaries tails to reveal a single definition
or quotation which clearly embodies this idea. All are in sub-
stantial agreement with the complete definition as given in
Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language
(1951) which is short enough to quote in toto: "1. the sum of
the characteristics or qualities that set one person or thing apart
from others; individual character; 2. the condition of existing
as an individual; separate existence; oneness; 3. a single person
or thing; individual; 4. (obs.) indivisibility; inseparability."

The first of these definitions is the most germane, but cer-
tainly does not encompass the meaning which it is desired to
convey in the title of this discussion. A parallel inadequacy
would be to define gravitation as the force that attracts one
body to another. Gravitation is more than this; it is the force
that attracts all bodies to each other.

jSimilarly, individuality is more than that which resides in a
person; it resides in every person. This fact— which probably no
one will deny— is in the writer's opinion, one of the prime facts
in human history and one of the prime factors in human rela-
tions. The failure of the lexicographers to recognize this mean-

126 Essays on Individuality

ing of the word is a testimony to the neglect from which the
subject of our discussion has sorely suffered. The proposed
definition does not include any doctrine, policy, theory or prac-
tice relating to individuals; these may be covered by the word
individualism. Neither does it carry any implication a priori as
to the importance of individuality, how pronounced it is or how
it shall be managed or interpreted. Some of these points will be
touched upon in this essay.

What facts relating to the possession of distinctiveness by
members of the human family can we assemble and how do
these bear on human problems and their solution? This is an
incomparably large question.

Before approaching it directly, it seems well to dispel certain
misconceptions which may stand in the way of considering fairly
the material which is to be presented. Because the writer is a
scientist he does not spell science with a capital S. He has
learned, he believes, "the great lesson of humility which science
teaches us, that we can never be omnipotent or omniscient,"
and that "man is not and never will be the god before whom
he must bow down." There are many questions which human
minds are apparently not equipped to answer. The great Ein-
stein developed remarkable new insights into how gravitation
operates, but I am told on good authority that he had not the
vaguest glimmering as to why it operates.

So it should not be concluded that I am confident all ques-
tions can be answered on a mechanistic basis and that there is
no room in my thinking for human wills and aspirations or for
anything other than a deterministic outcome. If this were my
attitude, I would not participate in this discussion. Actually, the
handiwork exhibited in the biochemical realm is in its way as
impressive as that seen in the heavens, and becoming acquainted
with some minute portions of this realm may increase rather
than decrease one's reverence and awe.

Concerning the ubiquity of individuality we can, I believe,

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 127

accept without danger of contradiction the categorical state-
ment that every human individual (even in the case of identical
twins) is distinctive and different. This will be so generally ac-
cepted that the statement may well be regarded as trite.

The question of the ways in which distinctiveness is exhib-
ited, however, and the extent to which differentness exists, is
one on which we will need to spend some time and thought,
because it is crucial to the whole discussion. One may accept
and give lip service to the idea of distinctiveness— all the time
being ignorant about the character of the differences and per-
haps even assuming that they are inconsequential. If they are
indeed inconsequential, then our whole discussion belongs in
the same category. We shall therefore address ourselves to the
question: What differences exist and how consequential are
they?.

The ways in which people differ from one another may be
"grouped under four headings: (1) anatomical, (2) physiologi-
cal, (3) biochemical, and (4) psychological. Never in the his-
tory of science and human thought, to the best of my knowl-

;e, has anyone ever made a serious attempt to look at these
differences specifically or to gain an over-all view of them. In
this relatively short discussion it will not be possible to do
more than present briefly a few of the outstanding findings,
including some references for those who wish to explore the
subject farther.

While it has been common in the past for students of anat-
omy (in medical schools for example) to learn little about
normal variations, such variations are abundantly present and
cannot safely be regarded as trivial.

Although the textbook picture of the hiirpari stQrnarh, for

example, is well stereotyped, there are enormous variations in
shape and about a 6-fold variation in size.1 The position of

1 Barry J. Anson, Arias of Human Anatomy ( W. B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia
and London, 1951).

128 Essays on Individuality

the lowest portion of the stomach relative to the sternum or
breastbone, in normal individuals, may vary in height through
a range of about eight inches. It is no wonder on the basis of
these facts alone that people exhibit individuality in their
eating.

Livers, likewise, vary greatly in shape and position and at
least 3-fold in size. The length of the small intestine is com-
monly said to be twenty-two feet, but even when only a few
autopsy specimens were measured recently, they were found to
vary in men and women from eleven feet to twenty-five feet
nine inches.2 The relative position of the transverse colon
varies in its position in the visceral cavity. In some individuals
it is about twelve inches lower than in others. The forms of
the pelvic colons may be classified into nine different types,
and it becomes immediately evident that a high degree of indi-
viduality with respect to problems of elimination would be
expected on the basis of these anatomical differences alone.

Musculature throughout the body is far from uniform in
different individuals. As an instance, there are eleven patterns
involving the extensor muscle of the index finger alone! These
differences in muscular patterns are present throughout the
body and are associated with bone and tendon differences.
There are, for example, eight patterns of the extensor tendons
on the back of the hand. It is no accident that people exhibit
individuality in their signatures and that even small children
exhibit a high degree of individuality in their motor skills.
Muscular and other differences are also associated with the
fact that each individual has a highly characteristic breathing
pattern, has a distinctive heart action (as shown by blood
pressure tracings and electrocardiograms), and exhibits indi-
viduality in his manner of performing any gross muscular ac-
tivity, such as walking, running, throwing, rowing, etc., and
that individual capabilities and distinctiveness exist for deli-

2 Betty Underhill, British Medical Journal, November 19, 1955, p. 1243.

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 129

cate operations such as those involved in tapping out tele-
graphic messages, watchmaking, surgery, or even following the
profession of pickpocket.

The blood vessel patterns in the bodies of actual individuals
do not follow any single textbook picture. The major arteries
arising from the aortic arch may be from two to four in num-
ber, and when there are four, they are not necessarily the same
four in different individuals. The size of the carotid artery
which carries blood to the brain varies greatly from individual
to individual— as do all other vessels which carry blood to
specific localities. These variations are superimposed upon
those existing in the heart. The pumping capacities of the
hearts of young men— even though they are healthy and nor-
mal—vary over more than a 3-fold range.3

Endocrine glands vary widely from individual to individual.
Thyroid glands, for example, may vary in weight, among
normals, from nine to fifty grams,4 the parathyroids (two to
twelve in number) vary in weight from fifty to three hundred
mg. The testes in normal males weigh from ten to forty-five
grams; the ovaries in females vary in weight from two to ten
grams and contain at birth from thirty thousand to four hun-
dred thousand ova. The pineal glands weigh from 50 to four
hundred mg., and pancreas glands contain from two hundred
thousand to two million five hundred thousand islets of
Langerhans.5 The adrenal cortices of different individuals are
said to vary about 10-fold in thickness.6 It should be empha-
sized that the values given above are "normal" ones. Other
values outside the above ranges are not infrequently encoun-
tered, but they are regarded as abnormal. Certainly no one

3 G. C. Ring and others, Journal of Applied Physiology, 5, 1952, pp. 99-110.

4 Arthur Grollman, Essentials of Endocrinology, 2nd ed. (J. B. Lippincott Co.,
Philadelphia, 1947).

5 Gregory Pincus and Kenneth V. Thimann, eds., The Hormones (Academic
Press, Inc., New York, 1948), I.

6 Max A. Goldzieher, The Endocrine Glands (D. Appleton-Century Co., New
York and London, 1939).

1 30 Essays on Individuality

could survey the endocrine field and conclude that the differ-
ences among individuals are trivial.

Our entire nervous system is subject to the same wide vari-
ation, which is not only anatomic but physiological as well.
The patterns of the nerve trunks are distinctive. There are,
for example, eight distinct types of patterns of the facial nerve,
differing from each other almost as much as do river systems
on different continents, each type possessed by from 5 to 22
per cent of people. The lower point at which the spinal cord
terminates in the spinal column in different individuals varies
by about three vertebrae; the point of entrance of different
nerves varies similarly. Most people have two splanchnic
nerves, but some have three. Some do not have direct pyra-
midal nerve tracts in the spinal cord. In a recent study of re-
current laryngeal nerves in one hundred cadavers it was found
that of the two hundred nerves present, 57 per cent entered
the larynx without branching whereas 43 per cent were di-
vided-trunk nerves with from two to six branches.7 This same
kind of variation— probably even greater— is exhibited with re-
spect to the number and distribution of the numerous types of
nerve endings. If we are considered to be "bundles of nerves,"
each of us is a very different kind of bundle, and the anatomi-
cal variations are accompanied by variations in physiological
performance.

The individuality in anatomy is also very evident in our
brains. K. S. Lashley, in Psychological Reviews (1947), states:
"The brain is extremely variable in every character that has
been subjected to measurement." At another point, he says:
"Even the limited evidence at hand . . . shows that individuals
start life with brains differing enormously in structure; unlike
in number, size, and arrangement of neurons as well as in
grosser features." While there is no need to overemphasize the
importance of our brains, anatomically speaking, or to over-

7 William H. Rustad, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 14,
1954, pp. 87-96.

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 131

simplify their functions, it will be generally agreed that they
do have something to do with thinking processes. When
brains are so very different from one another, we should not
be surprised that individuality in thinking is the rule rather
than the exception.

A most important point in connection with these anatomi-
cal variations is the fact that no individual has "about an
average" anatomical make-up. To emphasize this let us con-
sider ten anatomical items which can be rated quantitatively
(as, for example, size of organ or gland). If we assume that
these anatomical variations are independent of each other
(which is permissible for the purposes of this illustration),
then the chance that an individual picked at random will be
in the middle 50 per cent of the range with respect to one
item is 1 in 2. However, the chance that he will be in the
middle 50 per cent with respect to all 10 items is only 1 in
1,024! Real people exhibit individuality and in a sense are
always exceptional people.

Physiological individuality is exhibited to a marked degree
no matter what area we consider. In that of the senses, for
example— seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, the sense of touch,
etc.— striking evidence of individuality can be found wherever
we look. Let us consider the sense of taste.

"Creatine, an organic compound prominent in muscle, is
bitter and biting to some and absolutely tasteless to others.
Phenylthiocarbamide is extremely bitter to the majority of in-
dividuals, but to a minority (from o up to 40 per cent depend-
ing on the ethnic group) 8 it is quite tasteless. Arthur L. Fox
has found that sodium benzoate tastes bitter, sour, sweet,
salty, or has no taste, depending on the individual tested. Some
individuals find saccharin to have two thousand times the
sweetening effect of sugar; to others, it is only thirty-two times

8 William C. Boyd, Genetics and the Races ot Man (Little, Brown and Com-
pany, Boston, 1950).

1 32 Essays on Individuality

as effective as a sweetening agent.9 For some, quinine is two
hundred fifty-six times as bitter as cascara; for others, it is only
twice as bitter. To 1 5 per cent of people mannose elicited no
taste response, to 20 per cent it was sweet only, to 10 per cent
it was bitter only, and to the rest it was sweet and bitter in
succession. Curt P. Richter has found children who could not
detect the sweetness of a 20 per cent sugar solution. In our
laboratories we have found that 10-fold and even 100-fold
variations in the taste sensitivities of different individuals for
such common substances as sugar, salt, potassium chloride, and
hydrochloric acid are commonplace.

Rather than delve farther into the area of the senses we
may be content with a quotation from the late Albert Blakes-
lee, who conducted many studies along this line: "Evidence
is thus given . . . that different people live in different worlds
so far as their sensory reactions are concerned."

Whether we consider heart action, brain waves, circulation,
breathing, the endocrine functions, the blood, temperature
regulation, or a multitude of other facets of physiology, the
story is the same— abundant evidence of individuality involv-
ing differences of great magnitude. The enormous variations
observed by Kinsey are ample evidence of wide degree of in-
dividuality in the area of sex physiology.

Let us now turn to the area of my particular competence,
biochemistry, and look very briefly at some of the evidences
of individuality which may be found there.10 These evidences
may be grouped under five headings:

Compositional differences. —A relatively large amount of in-
formation is available regarding blood composition, because
repeated individual samples can be collected and analyzed.

9 A. F. Blakeslee, Science, 81, 504-507 (1935), and Proceedings of the Na-
tional Academy of Sciences USA, 21, 1935, pp. 78-83, 84-90.

10 Roger J. Williams, Biochemical Individuality (John Wiley and Sons, Inc.,
New York, 1956). See also University of Texas Publication, May 1, 1951,
No. 5109.

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 133

The existence of blood groups has been recognized for over
fifty years, and it is now well established that individuals are
distinctive with respect to the content of immune substances
in their blood. The protein-bound iodine of the blood varies
from individual to individual over at least a 5- to 10-fold range,
and remains relatively constant for each individual. The bloods
of different individuals vary in their content of various types
of lipides; and in the case of cholesterol, lipide phosphorus,
and titrated fatty acids, at least, the individual differences are
persistent.

The digestive juices of different individuals vary in compo-
sition. The hydrochloric acid content of gastric juice of
healthy adult individuals collected under exactly comparable
conditions varies from 0.0 to 66.0 meq. per liter; the latter
value is twice the mean value. Some normal individuals have
at least four hundred times as much pepsin in their gastric
juice as others.

We are different even in our bones, as is shown by a recent
study by Dr. Pauline Berry Mack in which it was found that
the bones of normal young men of the same age vary in density
over a 5.7-fold range! These densities were determined by
careful X-ray measurements of the os calcis (heel bone).

Enzymatic differences.— Most of the chemical reactions tak-
ing place within our bodies are catalyzed by specific enzymes
which are produced in our bodies from the food we eat. The
potentialities for producing these numerous enzymes clearly
reside in the genes which we get from our forbears.

Repeated samples of blood from the same individuals have
been studied sufficiently to know the content with respect to
four enzymes. Alkaline phosphatase, arginase (corpuscles),
choline esterase, and amylase. In the case of each of these,
every individual tends to maintain a characteristic level, and
the variation between individuals is from 3-fold to 50-fold.
Other enzyme levels, in general, probably would show dis-

1 34 Essays on Individuality

tinctiveness also, if the necessary data were collected. Two
individuals of the same height and weight may have basal
metabolisms (summation of the oxygen consumption of every
organ and tissue) which are about the same, but the details
of the metabolism of each may be very different indeed from
those of the other. Some specific chemical reactions may be
taking place ten times as fast in one individual as in the other.
That this is actually so is shown by an experiment in which the
utilization of the amino acid D-phenylalanine was repeatedly
measured in the same individuals. Of the four individuals
tested, one utilized it to the extent of 94 per cent, one 61 per
cent, one 31 per cent, and one 3 per cent. Even in this very
small group there was a 30-fold spread with respect to the one
item.

Exaction patterns.— Extended investigations in our labora-
tories, involving the use of the newer tools of analysis, have
shown conclusively that each individual exhibits a distinctive
urinary excretion pattern. This can best be shown in charts
(pp. 136-37) which depict (Figures 1-13), through use of polar
coordinates, not only items present in the urine (Nos. 18 to
31), but also taste sensitivities for common substances (Nos.
1 to 5) and salivary constituents (Nos. 6 to 17). Each figure
represents the results of a series of studies on one individual,
in which the length of each line represents the magnitude of
one specific item. Figure 1 represents a purely hypothetical in-
dividual who would be exactly average with respect to every
item. The results for each individual are plotted, using pre-
cisely the same scale as was used in the hypothetical case. It is
clear that no real individual even remotely resembles this
hypothetical "average" case. These studies help to clear up
the question of how a bloodhound can tell one individual from
another. Our body chemistries are manifestly different one
from another, and individuality is everywhere in evidence.

Nutritional differences.— Two clear-cut cases may be cited

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 135

in which it has been shown that there is a wide spread in in-
dividual nutritional needs for specific substances. A careful
study was made of nineteen healthy young men, to determine
in each case how much calcium intake was required in order
for the individual to be in calcium equilibrium— that is, free
from calcium loss. At one extreme was an individual who
needed only 3.52 mg. per kg. of body weight; at the other ex-
treme, the corresponding requirement was for 16.16 mg.11
This 4.5-fold range was observed when a small group of nine-
teen young men were studied; if a large group of men and
women were to be investigated in this regard, the range would
probably be much larger.

Another clear-cut case is that of the amino acid threonine.
William C. Rose found for a small group of healthy young
men that the range of needs was from 0.3 to 0.5 g. per day.
For a small group of women the corresponding needs were
more recently found to be from 0.1 to 0.3 g. For men and
women taken together, the range is 5-fold, and if the groups of
individuals had been larger, the range would doubtless have
been larger.

Differences in pharmacological reactions to chemicals and
drugs.— Whenever a chemical or a drug has a physiological or
pharmacological effect on an individual, it does so because of
an interaction between the chemical or drug and some body
constitutents of the individual. If the same drug or chemical
affects two people differently, it must be because the body
chemistry of the two individuals is not the same. The indi-
viduality in response is shown in an experiment in which the
minimal concentrations of mercuric chloride required to cause
skin irritation in a series of thirty-five individuals were deter-
mined.12 One responded to a concentration of 1 part per 100,-

11 F. R. Steggerda and H. M. Mitchell, Journal of Nutrition, 31, 1946, pp.
407-422.

12 See A. J. Clark, The Mode of Action of Drugs on Cells (Edward Arnold
& Co., London, 1933), p. 107.

i36

Essays on Individuality

Figure 10

Figure 11

(Fics. 1-1S). Taste Sensitivity: 1. Creatinine, 1. Sucrose. 3. KC1. 4. NaCI. 5. HO. Salivary
Constituents: «. Uric acid. 7. Glucose. 8. Leucine. 9. Valine. 10. Citrulline. 11. Alanine,
12. Lysine. IS. Taurine, 14. Glycine. 15. Serine. It. Glutamic acid, 17. Aspartic acid.

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 1 37

Figure 9

Figure 12

Figure 13

(Fics. 1-13). (eontd.) Urinary Constituents: 18. Citrate. 19. Base Rf.28. 20. Acid B.I.32.
I. Gonadotropin, 22. pH, 23. Pigment/creatinine. 24. Chloride/creatinine. 25. Hippuric acid/
-eatinine. 26. Creatinine.' 27. Taurine. 28. Glycine, 29. Serine. 30. Citrulline, 31. Alanine

138 Essays on Individuality

000, another to 3 parts per 100,000, 5 more to 10 parts, 11
more to 30 parts, 13 more to 100 parts, and 4 failed to respond
even at this level. This more than 100-fold variation in a rela-
tively small group of thirty-five is indicative of large differ-
ences in microscopic anatomy and body chemistry.

A recent study was made on twenty-nine healthy young
men involving the effects of morphine injection.13 Saline con-
trols were used. The drug caused nausea in 18, sleep in 16,
drunkenness in 9, dizziness in 13, itching in 9, and indistinct
speech in 7, more than one of these effects being apparent in
some of the subjects. It is well known that this drug excites an
occasional individual instead of causing depression and that
some individuals, unlike others, are prone to become addicts.

Finally, let us consider the physiological effects of alcohol.
Nagle 14 found that 0.25 ounce of alcohol had the same effect
on certain individuals as did ten times the amount on others.
Jetter 15 found in a study of one thousand individuals, using
objective tests, that 10.5 per cent were intoxicated when the
alcohol blood level was 0.05 per cent, whereas 6.7 per cent
were sober when the alcohol blood level was eight times this
high, or 0.4 per cent. Later a study of eight hundred more in-
dividuals was completed, confirming the earlier observations.
To look for evidences of biochemical individuality is to find
them.

The study of individuality in the area of physiology and
biochemistry is in its very early infancy. Some of the basic
facts upon which its foundations rest— namely, that genes in
a sense beget enzymes (as well as morphological features) and
that enzyme efficiencies vary through the operation of partial
genetic blocks— are still very new to science. Every recognized
treatise in the fields of biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology,
and physiological psychology is written on the assumption that

13 Jane E. Denton and Henry K. Beecher, Journal of the American Medical
Association, 141, 1949, pp. 1050-1057, 1146-1153.

14 John M. Nagle, Journal of Allergy, 10, 1939, pp. 179-181.

15 W. W. Jetter, American Journal oi Medical Sciences, 196, 1938, p. 475.

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 1 39

normal man, the prototype of all humanity, is the primary if
not the exclusive object of study— he, above all, is to be fath-
omed and understood. With this basic philosophy I am in
strong disagreement.

In the area of psychology the existence of individuality has
long been recognized, and a number of books have been writ-
ten on the psychology of individual differences. Such study
has received, in my opinion, a tiny fraction of the attention
that it deserves, and the findings are often pitifully inadequate.
Too often such study has been thought of as a wart or blemish
on the face of the developing science of psychology. The idea
that there are two kinds of people, those with normal and
those with abnormal psychology, is valid only in the crudest
and most superficial sense.

There are two incontrovertible lines of evidence which indi-
cate that every individual has a distinctive mind-pattern, that
is, a pattern or profile of mental capabilities. One is found in
the numerous cases of individuals who have at best mediocre
abilities along the conventional lines covered in school work,
and yet excel— some of them to practically unbelievable ex-
tents—in some special way: mental arithmetic, memorization,
mechanical ability, artistic ability, musical ability. Such indi-
viduals have been sometimes designated as "idiot-savants," an
unfortunate designation which sets them aside as freaks, to
be considered quite apart from all other human beings. This
appraisal is not fair, however, because these individuals are in
a real sense caricatures, and observing them can tell us much
about ourselves.

Jose Capablanca was an example of an individual who had
moderate intellectual attainments in most respects but ex-
traordinary abilities along lines necessary for playing chess. He
won the first chess game he ever played— with an experienced
enthusiast— at the age of five. On one occasion, in the course
of seven hours he played 103 experts simultaneously and won

140 Essays on Individuality

all but one game— a draw. Could anyone doubt that he had a
distinctive profile of mental abilities?

Albert Einstein was doubtless the great mathematical genius
of his time. His mental powers in some other directions were,
however, not impressive. When a small child, he was very
slow to learn to talk— even at nine years of age his speech was
halting and slow. As a scholar he was evidently not apt in
language as exemplified by the fact that even though he came
to the United States, several of his books were written in
German and translated by others into English. If Einstein's
linguistic abilities had been on a par with his mathematical
abilities, he probably would have been intrigued by language
and would have written freely in languages other than his
mother tongue. There is strong evidence, on the basis of his
early school record, that he had a very definite and uneven
pattern of mental abilities.

It is my opinion that every individual exhibits a distinctive
profile of native abilities but that most of us have less promi-
nent peaks than do the Capablancas or Einsteins. That this is
so is indicated by the studies of primary mental abilities by
Thurstone.16 Such abilities as arithmetical facility, rote mem-
ory, word familiarity, and space perception, are possessed
unequally by typical individuals. Individuals can be trained in
any of these, but if two individuals who are far apart initially
are trained the same length of time they will be farther apart
after training than they were before training. Psychologists
have great difficulty— when they make the attempt— in separat-
ing and identifying what are truly primary mental abilities,
but the existence of distinctive patterns of mental abilities
can hardly be doubted. I recently went through the results of
tests on about two hundred prospective college freshmen who

16 L. L. Thurstone, Primary Mental Abilities (University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1938), and L. L. Thurstone, "Primary Mental Abilities," in Cen-
tennial, Collected Papers Presented at the Centennial Celebration, Washing-
ton, D. C, September 13-17, 1948 (American Association for the Advance-
ment of Science, 1950), pp. 61-66.

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 141

had been examined for "verbal" and "mathematical" pro-
ficiency. In about 30 per cent of them, there was a wide dis-
parity between the results of the two types of tests, each of
which was given twice and averaged. In accordance with this
crude and very limited measure, about 70 per cent showed no
very distinctive pattern. If the measurements were refined and
detailed, all would doubtless have exhibited patterns.

Even in this short discussion of individuality in mental abili-
ties, it should be pointed out that the evidence in this area is
enormously strengthened by that in the areas of anatomy,
physiology, and biochemistry, where the evidence is more di-
rect and less subject to interpretation. On the basis of the
biochemical, physiological, and anatomical evidence, the ex-
istence of psychological individuality would be presumed to
exist even if there were no direct evidence.

Having reviewed briefly the question of what differences
exist among human beings and how great these differences
are, we may well turn our attention to the question of how
these differences arise.

This brings us to the historic nature-nurture controversy,
which in the minds of biologists has been completely resolved
so far as its general outlines are concerned. No organism or
attribute of an organism exists except as a result of interplay
between heredity and environment. The importance of heredi-
tary variation (individuality) cannot be minimized because
without it evolution would be impossible.

It is no secret, however, that the trend of thinking in the
field of the social sciences is environmentalistic. Even geneti-
cists have leaned over backward in this regard and have seemed
unwilling to stand up to the sociologists. This attitude is based
in part on an attempt to escape from determinism— "if hered-
ity is involved there is nothing we can do about it." Actually,
following the dictates of pure reason and leaving out the pos-
sibility of an individual being able to direct his own life, en-

142 Essays on Individuality

vironmentalism leads to determinism just as inevitably as does
hereditarianism. The mechanist can say that no organism ever
has control over its environment; every "movement into a new
environment" is merely the result of tropisms and conditioned
reflexes— responses to the old environment.

If, on the other hand, we possess some capability of order-
ing our own lives— and this is the crucial point— then neither
heredity nor environment, nor any combination of them, leaves
us helpless and without choice. We cannot escape determinism
by shifting to environmentalism. This is intrinsically just as
deterministic as hereditarianism. The only escape is the pos-
session of an endowment which makes possible some direction
of one's own life.

Let us assume, for the moment at least, that human beings
have this directive capability. How then can they exercise
choice in the face of a distinctive (and even fixed) heredity?
If, for example, I have been endowed by heredity with the
makings of an excellent singing voice, I have many choices. I
can cultivate it as an amateur or as a professional; I can try
for opera, for jazz singing, for yodeling, or what not; I can
even (though this is unlikely) forget it. If I am endowed with
some special ingenuity, I can use it on the one hand to per-
petrate hoaxes, or in more "constructive" ways. If I am physi-
cally attractive and have the attributes which would make it
easy for me to seduce young girls, again I have choices— among
which is that of marrying early and being a "respectable" hus-
band.

I emphasize this point of alternatives because of the com-
plete absurdity, in my opinion, of the widespread idea: "If it's
hereditary, we can do nothing about it." Even if we have un-
questionable hereditary diseases, we are not, and will not in
the future, be without recourse. When nature provides me
with a defective pair of eyes, I may buy spectacles to correct
the difficulty. If they do not work perfectly, I cultivate activi-
ties which do not require the type of vision that is beyond me.

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 143

If I am born with diabetic tendencies, I learn to use insulin
effectively— and so on and on.

Among the myriad of potentialities with which every indi-
vidual is born, there still are an infinite number of possibilities
of development— provided this ability to order ones own life
exists.

If we can accept this point of view, we "ire in a position to
look directly and without too much bias, at the question of
how much heredity contributes to our individuality and to our
individual lives.

I cannot take the space here to amplify my opinion that
heredity contributes enormously to making us individuals,
anatomically, physiologically, biochemically, and psychologi-
cally. This does not deny the indispensable interplay of en-
vironment. Indeed it is important to emphasize that environ-
mental influences— particularly nutrition— are capable of do-
ing far more than is commonly supposed, to contribute to the
solution of genetically rooted human problems.

Environmentalism, however, is indefensible in the light of
modern knowledge. So is the position of the hereditarian. The
genecotarian position, which recognizes the interplay between
genetic and ecological factors, is the only point of view which
can stand up in the light of our modern knowledge of biology.
Furthermore, it is essential that we develop expert genecotar-
ians— those who are expert in adjusting the environment to
the distinctive genetic needs of human individuals. One can-
not be expert in this area unless he is versed both in human
genetics and human ecology (environments).

Having considered some of the facts of individuality, and
how individuality arises, we are ready for a summary treat-
ment of the key question, namely: What significance do these
differences and the resulting individuality have in human Hie?

In widespread areas of human interest individuality is of

144 Essays on Individuality

the utmost importance. It is indispensable for evolution— this
is a well recognized fact of biology.

Politically, individuality is fundamental. If we did not pos-
sess individuality we would all have the same tastes in eating,
drinking, reading, art, music, religion, and all other pursuits
and would willingly submit to regimentation and censorship
in all matters. If our distinctiveness involves mere trivialities,
then our love of liberty and our desire to make our own de-
cisions are trivial also, as I have suggested in my book: Free
and Unequal. Government by the people is justified only be-
cause we all have distinctive patterns of mentality and by
pooling our faculties we can hope to come out with better
answers than if we heed one man (a dictator) who has his
own mental pattern and may be very incompetent in some
respects. Effective pooling of our faculties is not easy. Socially,
individuality is just as indispensible. Without individual dif-
ferences, in make-up and in function, a free society could not
exist.

fin medicine, recognition of the scope and importance of
individuality is indispensable to progress, and holds tremendous
potentialities for the future. Up to now there has been too
much lip service to individuality; far too little development of
expertness with respect to the problems it presents. Failure
to recognize the importance of individuality is probably re-
sponsible for development of much of the mental disease
which afflicts us in this modern day. Everyone likes to be ap-
preciated and loved. Many suffer from inconsiderate treat-
ment because they will not and cannot fit into the mold pre-
pared by society for them. The successful treatment of mental
disease likewise must take into account the individuality (in
all respects) of the individual treated.

Ciime very often has its roots in the failure to recognize the
existing extreme individuality and to find activities (jobs) that
each individual can do and like.

Family relations could be greatly improved by additional

Individuality and Its Significance in Human Life 145

knowledge about individuality. Wives, husbands, and chil-
dren suffer and produce suffering in others when they are
forced into a mold or an attempt is made to "make them over."

Race problems flourish on lack of appreciation of individu-
ality and of interracial differences. In this area we desperately
need "more light and less heat."

In the field of education, the recognition of each child's
individuality (as it really exists) can hardly fail to produce a
revolution in attitude if not in practice. Each child should
begin, even in nursery school, to learn about himself and his
fellows, to respect their individuality, and pave the way for
decisions as to how he will order his own life.

Philosophy cannot fail to be affected by a better appreci-
ation of the far-reaching character of individuality. Grandiose
generalizations about the nature of man will have to be scruti-
nized. Individuality explains in part why there are so many
philosophies, and so many questions that philosophers indi-
vidually think important. Philosophies have been generated
by men with many different patterns of mind.

In the field of fine arts, individuality plays a tremendous
role. The creative artists show marked individuality, and the
appreciators likewise. We cannot all be taught to like the
same things because we are not built alike. We can possibly
avoid being angry with one another because of differences of
taste.

4 Individuality is basic to the development of religious belief
or disbelief. William James' classic Varieties of Religious Ex-
perience would not have been written were people not consti-
tuted very differently mentally and emotionally from one an-
other.

Indeed, it seems that an unrealistic and false view of the
Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of man has served as a
strong deterrent to the recognition of human differences (and
the individuality which they denote), in spite of the fact that
the worth of individuals is basic in all the teachings of Jesus.

The Historian and the Individual

by James C. Matin

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IS AN AGE DEDICATED TO SCIENCE, SO-

called, which in the United States is in fact mostly technology.
In such a cultural environment the historian finds his position
peculiarly difficult. He comes to realize that it is all but im-
possible to make himself understood and to defend his pro-
fessional role as expounder of the unique. Science deals with
generalization about data arranged in groups by the process of
classification, according to selected criteria. The search for
laws is the function of science. The application of such laws
to supposedly useful purposes is technology. Thus functional-
ism, which had always received emphasis in the practical
United States, became the watchword of the twentieth cen-
tury.

History, on the other hand, is unique in an absolute sense.
Each person is biologically unique, and each fact or situation
is the product of unique causation in space and time— a par-
ticular space and a particular time. The study of history is in-
tellectual enterprise, the object of which is to reconstruct the
record of historical reality to the closest approximation rea-
sonably possible. As the materials of history and their com-
binations are unique, occurring at particular times and places—
not just anywhere— there can be no laws in history, nor re-
curring patterns, predictability, or functionalism. In an abso-
lute sense there can be only one possible reconstruction of
historical reality. Historical method must be as unique as the

146

The Historian and the Individual 147

past reality it seeks to reconstruct. The nearest approximation
of accurate reconstruction of the past is attained by dealing
with the past as a whole, though not of course with the whole
of the past. History is irreconcilable with either science in
general or social science in particular. History is sui generis.

History is concerned with space, time, and change. It is con-
cerned also with the unique person, with the unique event,
and with their combinations. A differentiation must be recog-
nized, however, as to what is possible in historical study for
time prior to and after the advent of written records. Both
periods have a history, but convention has rather generally and
arbitrarily limited the term history to the time since the ad-
vent of the written record. This restriction, without clearly
defined reasons, has had an unfortunate effect on both areas
and has caused misunderstanding about their interrelations.
The justification for differentiation which is valid concerns
the critical problem of the role of the individual item of data
as distinguished from the role of groups of data in history and
science— the distinction between the nature of history and of
the sciences.

Historical actuality is unique and irreversible. Prior to the
appearance of man upon the scene it was independent of man.
Since the advent of man, he has participated in historical
actuality, and his unique records were added to the classes of
records left by pre-man processes. These man-records are
roughly of two kinds, unwritten and written. The record ex-
pressed in written language introduced into the situation for
the first time the possibility of identification in the record of
unique individuals and of recognition of them as persons dis-
tinguishable from the groups within which they had previ-
ously been submerged— not in life, where their individuality
was recognized, but in the documentation of that role of
singularity.

Convention has differentiated history recorded in written

148 Essays on Individuality

documents from everything prior to writing and has called it
history, as separate from what the same convention calls pre-
history. The only validity such distinctions possess is that the
subdivision is a matter of convenience, making intelligence
effective. An unfortunate effect, however, has been that the
essential historical actuality is obscured, or lost to sight, just
because of the peculiarities of the documents. Both history
and pre-history as so defined dealt with people, unique indi-
viduals, in spite of their inability in the earlier time of leaving
a written record of that individuality.

The nature of the documentary records of history imposes
the necessity of different tools and procedures for reading and
interpreting them. The purely geological record requires one
set of specializations; the biological record adds another; the
different earth sciences require still others; the pre-writing
man-records make further additions necessary. And the writ-
ten man-record, with its potential of isolation and identifica-
tion of the individual, introduces a wholly new order of mag-
nitude into the problem of reconstruction of historical actu-
ality, its records, and their interpretation. It is important to
emphasize that the addition of the written record did not
limit the historian to that new class of documentation, al-
though, unfortunately, such limitation has been too largely
accepted.

As participant in these conventions about periodization
and fragmentation of history as comprehensively described,
the historical profession permitted itself to be placed in a false
position. To be sure, written-record history is man-centered
because men wrote the documents. But men also made the
artifacts of the archeologist, and geological history is no less
history because pre-man-geological records were made without
the participation of man. Furthermore, geological history still
continues with man as a participant in the making of the
record. Man as a species may become extinct, and in his stead

The Historian and the Individual 149

a wholly unpredictable being may arise to operate upon this
earth. Would man's sojourn upon the earth, together with its
written record, be ruled out then by definition as geological
history, as pre-history, or, as not-history?

In view of these considerations, it is important that per-
spective about history and about its nature be preserved. It
is imperative to intellectual integrity about history, even about
that infinitesimally small segment which relates to the sojourn
of man on earth as a language-writing being, to focus upon
the verbalization of the problem by Fred Morrow Fling— that
history deals with the past as a whole, but not with the whole
of the past. That must be the guiding ideal in the study and
writing of history, regardless of the period selected for investi-
gation.

In the process by which science operates, individual facts
are assembled and classified according to likeness within the
classes, and difference among classes. Arrangement into cate-
gories is accomplished by the application of selected criteria,
the choice of these standards being governed by the purpose
for which they are to be used. In other words, classification is
subjective, relative, and functional, and is valid only within
the frame of reference specified by such limiting factors. In
general, these principles of scientific method apply to all the
sciences, whether physical, biological, or social; or synthetic
combinations of them.

But, more specifically, the product of such operations falls
into two categories: objective and subjective relativism. In the
former, which is emphasized in the natural sciences, to be ac-
cepted as valid the results of scientific investigation must be
verifiable. In the latter, which is emphasized in the social
sciences, and in history when defined as a social science, ac-
cording to the philosophy of John Dewey, Charles Beard, and
Carl Becker, verifiability is limited or even denied. According
to this latter view all social science must necessarily be con-

1 50 Essays on Individuality

structed according to a personally selected frame of reference,
whether or not admitted, a condition which renders intellec-
tual enterprise in this area subjective and uncertain. The re-
semblances of this point of view to that of the Greek Sophists
are striking

In scien. , the uniqueness of the individual item of fact is
ignored or is subordinated to the formula of classification. As
applied to facts about inanimate objects, or to plants and the
lower animals, this may not appear to possess significance as a
violation of individuality. But the principle of scientific pro-
cedure is the same as when applied to people. When dealt
with scientifically, the human person is stripped of all his
uniqueness. Science is a-moral, and its method violates the
uniqueness of all facts. So far as their absolute properties are
concerned, all facts are distorted and falsified by science. Other-
wise science's chosen purpose could not be achieved. Only the
status of human persons as beings of an order of magnitude
distinct from all others invests their fate at the hands of sci-
ence with a special significance.

That scientists have gone too far in their generalization,
classification, and laws is evident at mid-twentieth century.
That area of science which is considered the most exact of all,
mathematical physics, provides the best illustration, and is
beautifully described by M. Born, with particular attention
to Nels Bohr's principle of Complementarity. Born insists at
the close of his article, "Physics and Metaphysics" (Scientific
Monthly, May, 1956), that this principle possesses applica-
bility outside of physics, in fact, "not only in philosophy but
in all ways of life" when two kinds of expressions are neces-
sary—when a single "description of the whole of a system in
one picture is impossible; there are complementary images
which do not apply simultaneously but are nevertheless not
contradictory and exhaust the whole only together."

Pleistocene geology is of particular interest in connection

The Historian and the Individual 151

with the thought pursued here, because the record is continu-
ous into the present. Furthermore, during the latter part of
Pleistocene time primitive man participated in making the
geological record, because of his influence upon landscape.
Indeed, the present is within the Pleistocene geological unit
of time and so is the immediate future, so far as foreseeable.
Also, the archeological record makes certain the long occu-
pance of the earth by man during the later Pleistocene and
the interrelations between man and landscape. Intensive study
of this geological time-span is comparatively recent, but re-
search has come to important conclusions. The intimacy with
which the Pleistocene formations may be studied forces the
rejection of a large part of the generalization about geological
process. Each spot emerges as unique, possessed of its own
individual history. Much of this can be reconstructed and
dated in remarkable detail. Most important to this theme of
history is that in the Pleistocene the order of magnitude of
geological and present time merge into one and the same thing,
without discontinuity. The processes studied in geology or
geological processes are still operating and in an order of
magnitude significant to contemporary man's planning about
the future of his occupance of the earth.

An example is found in the earth sciences in the case of
W. M. Davis' cycle of erosion which holds that landscapes
experience successive stages of youth, maturity, old age, and
rejuvenation. But, in the field, particular landscapes have not
been found to follow such a uniform pattern. Each area of
the earth's surface has been subject to so many different vari-
ables, operating in unpredictable combinations, as to create
unique physical formations with unique histories. Carl Sauer
insists in his book, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, 1952,
that the unreality of Davis' system has actually delayed learn-
ing about physical geography.

In ecology, which may be described as the study of organ-

152 Essays on Individuality

isms living together, the two major American schools of
theory, those of E. F. Clements and those of H. C. Cowles—
particularly the former— were highly formalized. A 1954 prod-
uct of this type of thinking about the North American grass-
land was summarized for review purposes as follows:

The basic media of interpretation that appear throughout
the work are the theories of the closed community, natural
succession, and climax. It is conceived that prior to the inva-
sion of the white man the prairie consisted of essentially stable
climax communities, ". . . the outcome of thousands of years
of sorting of species and adaptations to soil and climate.
Grassland soils through untold centuries have been thoroughly
protected by the unbroken mantle of prairie vegetation." The
author looks upon the prairie as ". . . much more than land
covered with grass. It is a slowly evolved, highly complex or-
ganic entity, centuries old. It approaches the eternal. Once
destroyed, it can never be replaced by man."

The reviewer who wrote the above, and an increasing num-
ber of other ecologists, repudiated these concepts of a fin-
ished world that had been destroyed by modern man. Vege-
tation was not an organism; the concept of natural succession
leading to climax was not historically realistic. Disturbances
from natural causes, and by primitive man, had repeatedly
interrupted plant successions, even at times destroying the
vegetational cover altogether— not once, but, in some places,
repeatedly. H. A. Gleason had pioneered the individualistic
concept of the plant association and a number of other real-
istic points of view about vegetation, but was largely ignored
by his generation. Belatedly, ecologists have learned in the
hard way the extent to which he was correct. Vegetation is an
open system of change, subject to influences of many inde-
pendent variables. Whether forest or grass cover, the vegeta-
tion of any particular spot possesses a unique history. Having
been partially or wholly destroyed repeatedly, it has demon-

The Historian and the Individual 153

trated a remarkable capacity to recuperate, always in a variant
form.1

The soils of the North American grassland present another
case to illustrate the issues under consideration. The recon-
struction of the record of their history, with the aid of the
tools of Pleistocene geological records, archeology, and ecology,
demonstrates that soils of some areas have been destroyed and
renewed repeatedly. To those records are added the verdict
of the written record, to the same effect. Yet these soils were
so productive when European man first occupied them that in
his ignorance he called them 'Virgin" soils. They were the
soils pictured as the product of "untold centuries." To be
accurate about soils, each spot must be studied and its history
reconstructed. Soils are not an organism experiencing life cycles
of youth, maturity, and old age, but are an open system. The
time factor in soil formation varies with the nature of the
parent materials and circumstances, but upon occasion it has
been demonstrated to be less than the life span of the men
who may occupy the area. For some loessial materials the time
factor for freshly exposed materials is zero.2

1 The quotation is from Hugh M. Raup's review of John E. Weaver, "The
North American Prairie" (1954), in The Quarterly Review oi Biology, 30,
June, 1955, pp. 156-157. See also Frank E. Egler's review of the same book,
Ecology, 37, January, 1956, pp. 208-209. For literature on forests written from
the similar point of view as these reviews, see the monographs by Hugh M.
Raup and associates in the publications of the Harvard Forest Bulletins,
Petersham, Massachusetts. H. A. Gleason's first paper formulating explicitly
"The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association," appeared in the Bulle-
tin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 53, 1926, pp. 7-26.

2 Waldo Wedel, "Environment and Native Subsistence Economies in the Cen-
tral Great Plains," Smithsonian Misc. Collections, 101, No. 3; "Prehistory and
Environment in the Central Great Plains," Transactions of the Kansas Acad-
emy oi Science, 50, 1947, pp. 1-18; "Some Aspects of Human Ecology in the
Central Plains," American Anthropologist, 55, 1953, pp. 499-514; Hans Jenny,
Factors in Soil Formation, 1941, pp. 35-38; James C. Malin, "Dust Storms,
1850-1900," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 14, May, August, November, 1946,
pp. 129-144, 265-296, 391-413; The Grassland of North America, 1947, Chs.
8-10, and pp. 212-221; "Man, State of Nature and Climax . . . ," Scientific
Monthly, 74, January, 1952, pp. 29-37.

1 54 Essays on Individuality

The anthropologist deals primarily with man prior to acqui-
sition of the art of writing. Necessarily he deals with the
anonymous, with human beings in groups according to some
scheme of classification. The nature of the data compels such
a technique. But, when he studies human cultures historically,
except for these limitations imposed by the absence of indi-
vidual identification, the anthropologist must operate as does
the historian according to the conventional definition.

Each cultural group is unique and possesses distinguishing
properties that are unique in the absolute sense, because they
belong to a particular time, place, and people. These proper-
ties cannot be duplicated elsewhere, nor in the same place and
population at another time. The anthropologist, when writing
the history of cultures, is not a social scientist in search of
laws, but a historian reconstructing unique historical reality.
So far as he uses social science techniques of classification as
the basis of operation on a mass of anonymous data, he is
doing so as a historian. He is describing, in successive periods
of time and space, the changes in the states of culture that
took place under the multifactoral relations in which the cul-
ture or cultures in question operated. Within the limitations
stated, this operation might be called historical social science
or historical sociology. But the terms social science and soci-
ology have been used in so many ways, mostly in a context of
social laws, recurring cycles, social planning, etc., that few
would probably differentiate from these the limited meaning
here set forth. These reasons seem adequate to justify the use
of a different term— "cultural history," as more meaningful
for the historical operations of the anthropologist.

In anthropogeography, where the natural and the human
record are merged, Carl Sauer has again spoken out plainly.
In his Agricultural Origins and Dispersals he rejects the use
of the terms science and social science and uses natural his-
tory and cultural history: "The things with which we are con-

The Historian and the Individual 155

cerned are changing continuously and without end, and they
take place, for good reason, not anywhere, but somewhere;
that is, in actual situations or places. That succession of events
... is quite other than the conceptual models that are set up
as regular, recurrent, or parallel stages and cycles." 3

In the field of geography in its more traditional sense, and
in contradistinction to the systematic approach based upon
classification and generalization, Derwent Whittlesey main-
tains that the essence of geography lies in differentiation of
areas of the earth's surface. Of course, the heart of this argu-
ment is the insistence upon uniqueness of each and every area
that might be selected as an object of study. Only in descrip-
tion of "the entire content of the human occupance of the
area," and in differentiation of it from other areas, is knowl-
edge about geography effective.4 Differentiation describes with-
out indulging in value judgments, functionalism or planning.

In biology, the discovery of chromosomes and genes opened
the way to new concepts of genetics. Carried into the field of
taxonomy, biologists emphasize the genetic uniqueness of every
unit in a population classed for systematic purposes into genera
and species. These individual differences are absolute and a
knowledge of them has worked a revolution in the concepts
of genetics. The ramifications of so remarkable a principle are
yet scarcely explored.

Thus it is clear that among the sciences, primary and syn-
thetic, a significant challenge has been registered against over-
emphasis upon generalization, upon laws, upon cyclic repe-
tition, and prediction. There has been more than a protest.
Among the more independent and creative minds new paths

3 Carl Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, p. 2.

4 Derwent Whittlesey, "The Regional Concept and the Regional Method,"
P. E. James and C. F. Jones (Editors), American Geography: Inventory and
Prospect (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1954) l9"68; "Southern
Rhodesia — An African Compage," Annals of the Asseciation oi American
Ceographers, 46, March, 1956, pp. 1-97.

156 Essays on Individuality

have been marked out and important innovations introduced
and demonstrated in both theory and practice. Uniqueness of
facts and combinations of them defy classification, and for
certain areas of knowledge the theory and structure of science
must be reconstructed in accordance with the principle of
uniqueness. Particularly this has occurred in the field, as dis-
tinguished from the laboratory, sciences. But while these de-
velopments have been conspicuous in the "sciences," so-called,
substantially the opposite has occurred in the social sciences,
and even history is claimed as a social science.

The attempted transformation of history into a social sci-
ence came about under the influence of John Dewey and others
of the so-called pragmatic group in philosophy and ethics; and
under the influence of Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson,
and Carl Becker in history. The philosophy of Benedetto
Croce was drawn upon also. Subjective relativism, with its
emphasis upon presentism, functionalism, and social planning,
became the watchwords of history as social science— to make
good citizens and good Americans. The path they pioneered
was then written into the fabric of educational thought and
practice by a series of committees. The nihilism of their scep-
ticism was as complete as that of the Greek Sophists, but with-
out benefit of a Socrates to insist upon the validity of ethical
principles.5

5 National Education Association, Educational Policies Commission, The
Unique Function of Education in American Democracy (Washington, 1937);
American Historical Association Commission on social studies in the schools
(appointed, 1928), report in 16 volumes, two of which are of particular im-
portance to the present discussion: A Charter tor the Social Sciences, 1932,
and Conclusions and Recommendations, 1934. Charles Beard had a conspicu-
ous hand in both of these commissions and their product. The Social Science
Research Council, Bulletin 54, Theory and Practice in Historical Study: A
Report of the Committee on Historiography, 1946, Merle Curti, chairman;
Bulletin 64, The Social Sciences in Historical Study: A Report of the Commit-
tee on Historiography, 1954. Charles Beard was a member of the committee
that prepared Bulletin 54, the other members being his or Carl Becker's

The Historian and the Individual 1 57

The committee that prepared Social Science Research Coun-
cil Bulletin 64 expressly repudiated (pp. 26-27 n.) the unique-
ness of history, holding that the insistence by "certain German
historiographers" upon the unique in history "appears to rest
in part upon faulty logic and in part upon a semantic con-
fusion over the term unique." Likewise in the section on
anthropology (pp. 35-41) the committee ignored Carl Sauer's
insistence that in cultural history things happen in "non-dupli-
cated time and place," and change "continously and without
end, and take place, for good reason, not anywhere, but some-
where, that is in actual situations or places."

The historian's task is differentiation rather than the formu-
lation of sociological generalizations. Difference is an abso-
lute, while the similarities emphasized by sociological classifi-
cations are subjectively relative. Once the full significance of
that fact is clearly grasped, the whole orientation of the stu-
dent of history is changed in a manner that is fundamental.
Even though the historian has not proved as successful as he
might be in isolating the properties of uniqueness of the in-
dividual, or of history, or of other absolutes within his prov-
ince, yet to be clearly conscious of the nature of his task as
intellectual enterprise is an important achievement— in fact, a
major one. Having accomplished that, he can never again
think of history as a social science.

The degree to which social historians came to look upon
themselves as twentieth century counterparts of the French
Philosophes of the eighteenth century is emphasized by Carl
Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Phi-
losophers (1932), and the reception it received during the

disciples. The members of the committee that prepared Bulletin 64 were simi-
larly committed in their ideology.

The differing views of the present writer are to be found particularly in
Essays on Historiography, 1946, On the Nature oi History, 1954, and The
Contriving Brain and the Skillful Hand in the United States, 1955, all pri-
vately printed by the author.

158 Essays on Individuality

nineteen-thirties and after.6 Certain of the Phihsophes, the
most conspicuous of whom was Voltaire, turned to what they
called history, really sociology or social science and a-historical,
with the purpose of revealing the Laws of Nature. The twen-
tieth century historians who looked upon history as social sci-
ence were similarly obsessed with the determination to make
history useful in transforming the world to conform to their
heart's desire— some form of collectivism.

Of course, the eighteenth century, which mid-twentieth
century historians after Becker began to call the Enlighten-
ment, was really quite different in England, in the United
States, in France, and in Germany. Even in his enthusiasm for
eighteenth century France, Becker admitted that few Phihso-
phes were original thinkers, and that their significance lay in
their role as popularizers. The sixteenth and the seventeenth
centuries had been creative, and to some extent this continued
in England during the eighteenth century. In the Germanies
a great scientific, literary, and philosophical flowering occurred
near the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth
centuries. But the enthusiasm of Americans of the mid-twen-
tieth century for the mis-called Enlightenment of the eight-
eenth century centered upon the United States and France,
and particularly upon sociological generalizations. Implicit in
their inexorable Law of Nature was the idea of a Finished
World— Nature is good and only Man is vile. So far as the
doctrine of the perfectibility of man was concerned, he was
to be brought by reason into harmony with Nature and Na-
ture's God. Man, Nature, Equality, etc., were abstractions-
sociological generalizations in a never-never land.

The extent of this grounding of historical and social science
thought of the United States in eighteenth century confusion
may be illustrated by two books: Arthur A. Ekirch, The De-
cline of American Libeialism (1955), and Eric Goldman,

6 Malin, The Contriving Brain and the Skillful Hand, pp. 348-392.

The Historian and the Individual 1 59

Rendezvous with Destiny (1952). In explaining his under-
standing of Liberalism, Ekirch asserts that "the eighteenth
century was its classic age" (p. 11 ), and made these eighteenth
century formulations his measuring stick for all that came
after.

The formula adopted by Goldman was to label the liberal
reformers "by the terms they applied to themselves [p. viii]."
For the most part these self-styled liberals were actually pur-
suing their private interpretations of the eighteenth century
phantoms. Thus Ekirch and Goldman did not really disagree
materially about what they considered fundamentals although
they got at them by different routes. Both are subjective rela-
tivists, finding the same basic frame of reference in the "Golden
Age" of the eighteenth century sociological formulas. But
social science classifications and generalizations possess only a
limited validity which is determined by the criteria, and the
use in a particular time and place, for which they are devised.
In other words, they are not valid any time, any where, and
the attempt so to apply them predetermines the outcome. In
these particular cases liberalism necessarily declined. History
is concerned with change; so, inevitably, times were soon out
of joint in terms of these eighteenth century absolutes. To
save themselves, some self-styled liberals, without abandoning
candidly their antiquated absolutes, undertook to redefine
Liberalism in such a manner as virtually to reverse the eight-
eenth century formula. That both Liberals and Conservatives
of the twentieth century are confused is not a matter of won-
der, especially when account is taken also of the further con-
tradictions introduced into the undigested eclectic conglomer-
ate during the nineteenth century from the work of Malthus,
Ricardo, Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Mendel, etc., all of which
discarded biological equality.

The concept of equalitarianism has a long history, but in
any case it is a social science term which by the process of

160 Essays on Individuality

classification emphasizes likenesses at the expense of differ-
ence. In the eighteenth century it was imputed the quality of
an absolute and was incorporated into the Declaration of In-
dependence of the United States in that unqualified form—
"All men are created equal." As no attempt was made to de-
fine the meaning in terms of criteria and use, each individual,
according to his own frame of reference, was left to his own
private rationalization. In the hands of extremists equality is
misused as an absolute in violation of the dignity of the unique
properties of the individual. At best, the concept of equality
is an approximation, statistical in character, and of limited
applicability. It is not a right or a property of individuality,
nor the basis for any claim of primary right. Any utility or
validity it ever possessed was as a derived mental construct
applicable to a particular time and place. At worst, the con-
cept of equality is an outrage upon human dignity.

The impact of the contradictions between the Finished
World of the eighteenth century and the Evolutionary World
of the late nineteenth century calls for some explanation. In
the alleged eighteenth century climax of Liberalism, the Age of
Reason, and the State of Nature, only Man was vile. But this
static eighteenth century mythical world was irreconcilable
with the Evolutionary World of Spencer, Huxley, and Dar-
win, of science and philosophy a century after— not equality,
but survival of the "fittest." According to their eclectic habits,
Americans operating in the areas of natural history and natural
science failed to realize all the implications of the conflict.
The difference between the two modes of thought was abso-
lute. Among other difficulties, religious traditions injected an
emotional block to logical intellectual processes.

The particular background of the Finished World notion
was to be found in the Christian concept of the Garden of
Eden, the Fall of Man, and his Redemption by Divine Inter-
vention—the Blood Sacrifice. Eighteenth century rationalism

The Historian and the Individual 161

substituted the State of Nature for the Garden of Eden, Man's
violation of Nature for the Fall of Man, and the doctrine of
Progress, the unlimited perfectibility of man through his own
efforts, for Redemption by Divine Intervention. Basically the
only difference between the eighteenth century "Enlighten-
ment" and Christianity was the mode of Redemption— but
that difference was unbridgeable. The Evolutionism of the late
nineteenth century challenged both systems— no Garden of
Eden, no Fall of Man, therefore no Redemption was neces-
sary. Most evolutionists were not successful, however, in achiev-
ing a complete break-through into a truly Open System. With
few exceptions, evolutionists were still committed to fatal rem-
nants of the old systems, including a teleology which made
man the end-product. In a truly Open System there is no end-
product, for then the system would not be open. Man's con-
cern is with the dignity of man as a unique sentient being and
his potentiality to achieve a new order of magnitude of Actu-
ality—but to specify is to limit by the very indication of an im-
plied ideological goal. In an "Open System" the Potentiality
is unpredictable; the prime Absolute is that Potentiality be-
comes unique indeterminate Actuality.

Early twentieth century American ecologists, the "Classical"
schools of Clements and Cowles, were victims of this conflict
between eighteenth and nineteenth century thought. Although
under the illusion that they accepted evolution, they retained
their eighteenth century nature concepts: natural succession,
they insisted, led to climax formation— an inexorable law of
Nature if "civilized" (no longer in the State of Nature) man
did not intervene and destroy Nature's finished handiwork.
That they were not conscious of the paradox and were un-
aware of the source of their ideas is immaterial to the present
discussion. The American conservation movement, as it took
shape during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth cen-
turies, was conspicuously emotional rather than intellectual

162 Essays on Individuality

and was wholly committed to a similar, basic paradox formula,
although arrived at by a route somewhat different from that
of the ecologists. The formula, an eclectic conglomerate of
contradictions, was a propaganda natural for several types of
short-term demogogery, which diverted attention from essen-
tials.

Differentiation and uniqueness are among the fundamentals
at the basis of the theory and practice of history. Differentia-
tion does not necessarily involve value judgments. Differences
among spaces on the earth, among objects in nature, among
persons, and among these at separate points in time, reveal
the fact that each in space and time is unique and in an abso-
lute sense. To the argument that the designation of unique-
ness is itself classification, a sufficient answer should be that
the two are not of the same order of magnitude. Uniqueness
is an absolute both in theory and in verification, while classi-
fication is relative to the selected criteria applied to all units
in a class.

The quest for a formulation of a theory of history in its
absolute character of uniqueness must determine the proper-
ties of the individual. Every object in nature possesses proper-
ties, but the human individual possesses additional properties
that distinguish him as a unique entity— intellectual curiosity,
and potentiality being among his singularities. By properties is
meant the essential characteristics without which he could
not exist and be identified. These properties, to qualify as such,
must not be derived from any subjective frame of reference,
but must be independent of any particular culture, and of
space and time. So far as any particular formulation of the
properties of the individual person fail in that respect, the
fault lies with the formulation and not with the concept of
properties, nor with the concept of uniqueness. These proper-
ties must identify and describe the dignity of the human per-
son, which is absolute. The person's right of defense of his

The Historian and the Individual 163

status in society and of his ethical principles must be based
upon his uniqueness inherent in these properties. Human
history is the unique record of the singularity of every indi-
vidual person.

The singularity of the individual is demonstrated biologi-
cally according to the genetic principles of chromosomes,
genes, etc. This individual difference is absolute.7

The human individual, in addition, possesses a contriving
brain; insatiable intellectual curiosity, regardless of utility; a
memory; the power to reason; the capacity to order facts for
long-range utilization; purpose; the will to make decisions and
a capacity to execute them in subtle ways. All of these qualities
are possessed by man at an order of magnitude which differ-
entiates him absolutely from other animals. How this status
was achieved, he does not know, but the individual person
knows that it did happen. And more, man possessed Poten-
tiality, a power to realize his Potentiality in Actuality; a power
to which no limit is known. This property of the individual
person has been the theme of the world's best minds through
all ages. Aristotle opened his Metaphysica with the dictum:
"All men by nature desire to know," and in De Anima he as-
serted that mind "can have no nature of its own, other than
that of a certain capacity." Also, "everything is a possible ob-
ject of thought." About a millenium and a half later St.
Thomas Aquinas gave the idea its most effective reformula-
tion: "Therefore infinity is potentially in our minds through
its considering successively one thing after another, because

7 Edgar Anderson, geneticist, has stressed in the taxonomy of plants that the
whole concept of genes and species must recognize the uniqueness of each indi-
vidual. Roger J. Williams, chemist, in Fiee and Unequal (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1953), has emphasized the biochemical uniqueness of every
person and the importance to medicine of a recognition of the fact. As among
human sub-species, E. Raymond Hall has insisted upon their unique properties
even in international political relations: "Zoological Subspecies of Man at the
Peace Table," Journal oi MammoJogy, 27, November, 1946, pp. 358-364.

164 Essays on Individuality

never does the intellect understand so many things, that it
cannot understand more." 8

As an academic discipline, anthropology practices a dual
role that has not been accurately recognized and differentiated
—that of cultural history and that of social science. As cultural
history it is concerned as vitally with uniqueness as is any
other aspect of history. Although dealing with unidentified in-
dividuals, certain data may be so ordered as to describe groups
of individuals and conditions as they change continuously at
particular points in space and time. Such descriptions are his-
tory, cultural history in the sense in which Carl Sauer used the
term; or for those who insist upon using other terminology,
they are historical social science or historical sociology, in the
same sense that the geologist uses the term historical geology
or historical geomorphology, or historical paleontology, paleo-
botany, or paleoecology.

There is no sound reason why the methods of the anthro-
pogeographer employed in those areas for anonymous data
may not also be applied to more recent data. But, in any case,
the end product is the description of uniqueness of the group,
or groups, their structure or behavior at specified points of
space and time, and when arranged in time sequences such
description may be effective reconstructions of historical se-
quences—social history or, more accurately, cultural history,
using the word culture in the anthropologist's sense. As the
object of history as applied to human beings must necessarily
be the differentiation of uniqueness among persons, this cul-
tural history based upon group data must give precedence to
history based upon the identifiable individual person as soon

8 The edition of The Works of Aristotle used here is that translated into Eng-
lish and edited by J. A. Smith, and W. D. Ross (Oxford: The Oxford Univer-
sity Press), the Physica, by R. P. Hardie, and R. K. Gage, 1930; the Meta-
physics, by W. D. Ross, 1908; De Anima, by J. A. Smith, 1931. The transla-
tion of the Summa Theologica used here is that of the Fathers of the English
Dominican Province, 1912. For a fuller discussion, Malin, The Contriving
Brain and the Skillful Hand, Ch. 11.

The Historian and the Individual 165

as the written documents become available for that purpose.
And from that point forward in time, the group data become
secondary or supplemental to history in terms of the unique
individual.

In history, written faithfully according to the principle of
the unique, the question of conservatism and liberalism is not
at issue. Those currently indoctrinated in the sociological con-
cepts of liberalism and conservatism, and the subjective-rela-
tivist frame-of-reference philosophy, are prone to reject the
principle of the uniqueness of the individual and of history.
In their commitment to the either/or form of logic they can-
not admit that it is possible to act upon any other basis, or
with objective integrity, or even an approximation thereof. No
one could be more dangerous, to either of the respective socio-
logical generalizations of extremes, than the stubborn his-
torian, with his insistence upon the unique properties of his-
tory and of the person. To be unique, to recognize it and to
act consistently upon it, is to be alone and lonely in a world
committed to groupthink, regardless of the name by which it
is called. The fact of uniqueness and the generalizations about
Liberalism and Conservatism are of wholly different orders of
magnitude and are irreconcilable.

The basic thinking of modern times has been performed,
not by the United States or Russia, but by western and cen-
tral Europe. That historic fact should focus attention upon
the critical question of the conditions under which the cre-
ativity of the contriving brains of men operate. How much
does cultural environment contribute and how much is origi-
nality the unpredictable product of the unique person, even
in spite of surrounding conditions? The features of the his-
tory of the United States which American historians boast
about— the open frontier, democracy, equalitarianism, and
mass-education— have thus far produced little that could qual-
ify as basic thinking. Technology is quite another matter. The

166 Essays on Individuality

uniqueness of history precludes laws, predictability, and plan-
ning, because those technological concepts and originality are
a contradiction of terms.

How is freedom of the individual in society to be defined?
Under what condition may he realize his fullest potentiality?
The most widely publicized formulation of the twentieth cen-
tury was the so-called "Four Freedoms," promulgated in 1941:
freedom of speech and of religion, and freedom from want
and fear. A cynical cartoonist pictured animals in a zoo that
could enjoy all four freedoms yet be locked in a cage. Of a fun-
damental character, however, were the four freedoms of the
priests of Apollo at Delphi some 200 years b.c. The differ-
ences between freedom and slavery then were described as
consisting of a protected legal status in society, personal in-
violability (freedom from seizure or arrest), freedom of eco-
nomic activity, and the right of unrestricted movement in
space. Some two thousand years of experience has not sub-
tracted anything from that formula.9

The most that can be done, probably, toward promoting
creativity is to provide unique minds with freedom to realize
their potentialities. The question is in order whether or not,
for this purpose, form of government per se is even relevant.
It is difficult to see how captivity to the errors of eighteenth
century sociological generalizations can contribute to origi-
nality. Planned and subsidized "research" monopolize time
and energy of competent minds that might otherwise accom-
plish something creative. It is thought control. A concept of
scholarship that has been conspicuous in Europe is that the
body of human knowledge possesses value in its own right,
and is to be pursued for itself as an object of study, and with-
out respect to any functionalism or usefulness to which it may
be put. By contrast, the attitude toward human knowledge

9 William L. Westermann, "Between Slavery and Freedom," American Histor-
ical Review, 50, January, 1945, pp. 213-227.

The Historian and the Individual 167

conspicuous among American subjective relativists, and fore-
most is SSRC Bulletins 54 and 64, is that only such fragments
of it are worth knowing as are "useful" to some present pur-
pose in the mind of the social science historian, or other social
scientist.

One approach is comprehensive and uncommitted, the other
is restricted, selective, programmatic, its functionalism being
determined by some supposed "usefulness" in the ephemeral
present of the investigator. The results of the practice of un-
committed scholarship in any field, however, is often produc-
tive of something that is actually and unexpectedly more use-
ful than studies undertaken with a functional purpose. The
reason is not difficult to seek, because the exploration of a
subject in all its relatedness may succeed in turning up the
unpredictable meanings. Also, this attitude toward knowledge,
in not being committed beforehand to a purpose, may be truly
discriminative. Instead of directing hostility toward and ridi-
cule at the so-called "ivory tower," that position of objective
isolation should be recognized by social scientists as critical to
all sound social policy studies.

In history, as in other intellectual enterprise, uncommitted
investigation is primary, not derivative, and its objectivity
alone affords the conditions conducive to a high order of re-
flective thought. Basic thinking is primary, technological appli-
cation or functionalism is derivative. Freedom of the mind
and functional commitments are contradictory and mutually
exclusive, because commitment imposes limitations. Only in
an uncommitted orientation can the mind be truly free.

Capitalism and Freedom

by Milton Friedman

THIS PAPER DEALS WITH THE RELATION BETWEEN THE FREEDOM

enjoyed by individuals in a society and the form of economic
organization adopted by that society. Its thesis is that a neces-
sary condition for individual freedom is the organization of
the bulk of economic activity through private enterprises oper-
ating in a free market— a form of organization I shall refer to
as competitive capitalism. While necessary for freedom, capi-
talism alone is not sufficient to guarantee freedom. It must
be accompanied by a set of values and by political institutions
favorable to freedom; these additional requirements are not
considered in this paper.

The economic system plays a dual role in promoting free-
dom. In the first place, economic freedom is itself an essential
component of freedom in general. Competitive capitalism, as
the system most favorable to economic freedom, is for this
reason an end in itself. In the second place, economic freedom
is a means toward political or civil freedom. By permitting an
effective separation of economic from political power, it re-
duces the costs of political idiosyncracy, and provides numer-
ous independent foci of potential opposition to the suppres-
sion of freedom. Historical experience and logical analysis alike
support this thesis.

The growth and spread of civil freedom in the West clearly
coincided with the spread of capitalism as the dominant sys-
tem of economic organization. I know of no example of a

168

Capitalism and Freedom 169

society, at any time or place, definable as a free society, that
did not use a predominantly private market system to organize
its economic activities. Equally clearly, capitalism alone has
not been enough to guarantee freedom. Japan, at least prior to
World War II, and Russia, prior to World War I, were capi-
talist societies, yet essentially autocratic in political structure.
Fascist Italy and contemporary Spain are additional examples,
though somewhat less clear ones; in both, the state has played
such a large role in controlling and conducting economic af-
fairs that it is perhaps better to describe them as socialist or
collectivist societies than as capitalist. And this is surely so for
National Socialist Germany.

Yet it is noteworthy that even in these countries— Nazi Ger-
many alone excepted— suppression of individual freedom has
gone nothing like so far as in the modern totalitarian regimes
of Russia and China, where economic collectivism is combined
with political authoritarianism and where little more than
vestiges of capitalism survive. The reason seems clear. Such
capitalism as there was provided some sources of power partly
independent of the overriding political authorities. In addi-
tion, of course, capitalism meant some measure of economic
freedom— so that the subjects of even Czarist Russia could
change some jobs without permission of an instrumentality of
the state.

The relation between economic freedom and political free-
dom is complex and by no means unilateral. In early nine-
teenth century England, the philosophical radicals and their
allies regarded political reform as primarily a means toward
economic freedom. Following Adam Smith, Ricardo, and
Bentham, they believed that a reduction of state intervention
in economic affairs, a large measure of hissez faire, was the
main requisite for rapid economic progress and the wide dis-
tribution of its fruits among the masses— and, as an aside, sub-
sequent experience under a largely hissez fake regime gives no

170 Essays on Individuality

reason to doubt the correctness of their belief. These early lib-
erals viewed the vested interests of the politically powerful,
particularly the landowners, as the chief obstacle to such a
policy. Political reform would give the power to the people
and the people would naturally legislate in their own interest,
which is to say, would legislate Jaissez faire.

From the end of the nineteenth century to the present, the
leading liberal writers— men like Dicey, Mises, Hayek, and
Simons, to mention only a few— emphasized the reverse rela-
tion: that economic freedom is a means toward political free-
dom. The triumph of Benthamite liberalism in nineteenth
century England was followed by a reaction toward increasing
intervention by government in economic affairs, and this tend-
ency to collectivism was greatly accelerated both in Great Brit-
ain and elsewhere by the two World Wars. Welfare, rather
than freedom, became the dominant note in democratic coun-
tries. Recognizing the implicit threat to individualism, these
writers feared that a continued movement toward centralized
control of economic activity would prove The Road to Serf-
dom, as Hayek entitled his penetrating analysis of the process.

Events since the end of World War II display a still differ-
ent relation between economic and political freedom. Collec-
tivist economic planning has indeed interfered with individual
freedom. At least in some countries, however, the result has
not been the suppression of freedom, but the reversal of eco-
nomic policy. England again provides the most striking exam-
ple. The turning point is perhaps the "control of engagements"
order which, despite great misgivings, the Labor Party found
it necessary to impose in order to carry out its economic policy.
Fully enforced and carried through, the law would have in-
volved centralized allocation of individuals to occupations. But
this conflicted so sharply with personal liberty that it was en-
forced in a negligible number of cases and repealed after the
law had been in effect for only a short period. Its repeal ushered

Capitalism and Freedom 171

in a decided shift in economic policy, marked by reduced re-
liance on centralized "plans" and "programs/' by the disman-
tling of many controls, and by increased emphasis on the
private market. A similar shift in policy occurred in most other
democratic countries.

The proximate explanation of these shifts in policy is the
limited success or outright failure of central planning to achieve
its stated objectives. However, this failure is itself to be attrib-
uted, at least in some measure, to the political implications of
central planning and to an unwillingness to follow out its logic
when so doing requires rough-shod trampling on treasured pri-
vate rights. It may well be that the shift is only a temporary
interruption to the collectivist trend of this century. Even so, it
illustrates strikingly the close relation between political free-
dom and economic arrangements.

Adam Smith saw clearly that the effective utilization of eco-
nomic resources requires the coordination of large numbers of
people. As he phrased it, "division of labor is limited by the
extent of the market." The developments in population and
technology since he wrote have continuously expanded the
scale on which coordination is required to take full advantage
of modern science. It is trite to note that literally millions of
people are involved in providing one another with their daily
bread, let alone with their yearly automobiles. The challenge
to the believer in liberty is to reconcile this widespread inter-
dependence with individual freedom.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the
economic activities of millions. One is central direction in-
volving use of coercion— the technique of the modern totali-
tarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals
—the technique of the market place.

The possibility of coordination through voluntary coopera-
tion rests on the elementary— yet frequently denied— proposi-

iy2 Essays on Individuality

tion that both parties to an economic transaction benefit from
it provided that the transaction is bi-Iaterally voluntary and in-
formed. Exchange can therefore bring about coordination
without coercion. A working model of a society organized
through voluntary exchange is a free private enterprise ex-
change economy— what we have been calling competitive
capitalism.

In its simplest form, such a society consists of a number of
independent households— a collection of Robinson Crusoes,
as it were. Each household uses the resources it controls to
produce goods and services that it exchanges for goods and
services produced by other households on terms mutually ac-
ceptable to the two parties to the bargain. It is thereby enabled
to satisfy its wants indirectly by producing goods and services
that other households ultimately use rather than directly by
producing goods for its own immediate use. The incentive for
adopting this indirect route is, of course, the increased "out-
put" made possible by division of labor and specialization of
function. In consequence, both parties can benefit from each
exchange. Since the household always has the alternative of
producing directly for itself, it need not enter into any ex-
change unless it does benefit, so no exchange will take place
unless both parties do benefit from it. Cooperation is thereby
achieved without coercion.

Division of labor and specialization of function could not go
far in a simple exchange economy in which a household is the
largest productive unit and in which final products are ex-
changed against final products. To extend the scope of division
of labor, the productive unit in existing market economies is
largely separated from the consumption unit. It takes the form
of an enterprise that serves as an intermediary between the use
of the resources owned by some households to produce prod-
ucts, and the acquisition of the products by the same or other
households. The introduction of such an intermediary permits

Capitalism and Freedom 173

cooperation in production over a far broader area and makes
possible complex chains of exchanges and indirect means of
utilizing resources. The elaboration of cooperative arrange-
ments is further facilitated by the use of "money/' or general-
ized purchasing power, to effect transactions rather than the
direct exchange of goods or services.

Despite the important role of enterprises and of money in
our actual economy, and despite the numerous and complex
problems they raise, the central characteristic of the market
technique of achieving coordination is fully displayed in the
simple exchange economy that contains neither enterprises
nor money. As in that simple model, so in the complex enter-
prise and money-exchange economy, cooperation is strictly in-
dividual and voluntary provided (a) that enterprises are pri-
vate, so that the ultimate contracting parties are individuals
and (b) that individuals are effectively free to enter or not to
enter into any particular exchange, so that every transaction
is strictly voluntary.

It is far easier to state these provisos in general terms than
to spell them out in detail, or to specify precisely the institu-
tional arrangements most conducive to their maintenance. In-
deed, much of technical economic literature is concerned with
precisely these questions. The basic requisite is the mainte-
nance of law and order to prevent physical coercion of one
individual by another and to enforce contracts voluntarily en-
tered into, thus giving content to "private." Aside from this,
perhaps the most difficult problems arise from "monopoly"—
which inhibits effective freedom by denying individuals alter-
natives to the particular exchange— and from "neighborhood
effects"— effects on third parties for which it is not feasible to
charge or recompense them.

Though full discussion is not possible here, the range of
problems involved is suggested by the divergent meaning at-
tributed to "free" as an adjective modifying enterprise. One

174 Essays on Individuality

meaning, the one that has generally been given to it in Con-
tinental Europe, is that "enterprises" shall be free to do what
they want, including fixing prices, dividing markets, and adopt-
ing other techniques to keep out potential competitors. An-
other, inherent in British thought and American law and tradi-
tion, is that anyone shall be "free" to set up an enterprise,
which means that existing enterprises are not "free" to keep
competitors out except by selling a better product at the same
price, or the same product at a lower price. The European con-
ception is a natural outgrowth of a "status" society; the Amer-
ican, of a democratic and equalitarian society. And the differ-
ent conceptions have in their turn reacted on the character
of the society; the European conception fostering a structured
economy, economic "classes," and an industrial aristocracy to
complement its social aristocracy; the American conception
fostering economic mobility, classlessness, and economic de-
mocracy to complement its social democracy.

So long as effective freedom of exchange is maintained, the
central feature of the market organization of economic activity
is that it prevents one person from interfering with another in
respect of most of his activities. The consumer is protected
from coercion by the seller because of the presence of other
sellers with whom he can deal. The seller is protected from
coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom
he can sell. The employee is protected from coercion by the
employer because of other employers for whom he can work,
and so on. And the market does this impersonally and without
any centralized authority.

Indeed, a major source of objections to a free economy is
precisely that it does this task so well. It gives people what
they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought
to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market
is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

The economic freedoms provided by the market include the

Capitalism and Freedom 175

freedom to starve, to use the phrase with which enemies of the
market delight to attack it. The market guarantees an indi-
vidual the freedom to make the most of the resources he hap-
pens to own, provided only that he does not interfere with the
freedom of anyone else to do the same. But it does not guaran-
tee that he will own the same amount of resources as anyone
else. The resources he happens to own reflect largely the acci-
dents of birth, inheritance, and prior good or bad fortune. And
there is nothing to prevent these from leading to wide dis-
parities in wealth and income. These disparities are morally re-
pugnant to many people and raise difficult ethical issues that
cannot be explored here. They also serve very real functions,
one of which will be noted later in this paper.

Insofar as disparities arise from monopoly, and similar mar-
ket imperfections, they would be reduced by a closer approach
to an ideal free market. But it must be recognized that even an
ideal free market is consistent with wide inequality. Individual
charity aside, there is no way of eliminating such differences
in wealth as would remain in an ideal free market, except by in-
terfering with the freedom of the more fortunate. It is a trite, if
unpalatable, observation that freedom and egalitarianism can
be inconsistent objectives. Fortunately, in practice they have
proved not to be. Historically, a free market has produced
less inequality, a wider distribution of wealth, and less poverty
than any other form of economic organization. There is less
inequality in advanced capitalist countries, like the United
States, than in underdeveloped countries, like India.

Though paucity of data makes it difficult to be sure, there
appears also to be less inequality in capitalist countries in gen-
eral than in collectivist countries like Russia and China. In
principle, collectivist societies could achieve substantial equal-
ity—albeit at the sacrifice of total output; in practice, they have
not done so or even tried to do so.

iy6 Essays on Individuality

The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate
the need for government. On the contrary, as already noted,
government is essential both as a forum for determining the
"rules of the game" and as an umpire to interpret and enforce
the rules decided on. What the market does is to reduce
greatly the range of issues that must be decided through politi-
cal means and thereby to minimize the extent to which govern-
ment need participate directly in the game. The characteristic
feature of action through political channels is that it tends to
require or enforce substantial conformity. The great advantage
of the market, on the other hand, is that it permits wide diver-
sity. It is, in political terms, a system of proportional repre-
sentation. Each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie
he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color the
majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit.

It is this characteristic of the market that we refer to when
we say that the market provides economic freedom. But this
characteristic also has implications that go far beyond the nar-
rowly economic. Political freedom means the absence of coer-
cion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to
freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch,
a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preser-
vation of freedom requires the elimination of such concen-
trated power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal
and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated— a
system of checks and balances. By removing the organization
of economic activity from the control of political authority, the
market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables
economic strength to be a check to political power rather than
a reinforcement.

Economic strength is capable of being widely dispersed, for
there is no law of conservation which forces the growth of new
centers of economic strength to be at the expense of existing
centers. There can simply be a larger number of millionaires,

Capitalism and Freedom 177

so to speak. Political power, on the other hand, is far more
difficult to decentralize. Its personal character imposes some-
thing more nearly akin to a law of conservation of power.
There can be numerous small independent governments. But
it is far more difficult to maintain numerous equi-potent small
centers of political power in a single large government, as there
can be numerous centers of economic strength in a single large
economy. In consequence, if economic strength is joined to
political power, concentration seems almost inevitable.

The force of this abstract argument can perhaps be demon-
strated best by example. One feature of a free society is surely
the freedom of individuals to advocate and propagandize
openly for a radical change in the structure of the society— so
long as the advocacy is restricted to persuasion and does not
include force or other forms of coercion. It is a mark of the
political freedom of a capitalist society that men can openly
advocate and work for socialism. Equally, political freedom in
a socialist society would require that men be free to advocate
the introduction of capitalism. How could the freedom to ad-
vocate capitalism be preserved and protected in a socialist
society?

In order for men to advocate anything they must in the first
place be able to earn a living. This already raises a problem for
a socialist society, since all jobs are under the direct control of
political authorities. It would take an act of governmental self-
denial whose difficulty is underlined by experience in the
United States after World War II with the problem of "se-
curity" among Federal employees, for a socialist government
to permit its employees to advocate policies directly contrary
to official doctrine.

But let us suppose this act of self-denial to be achieved. For
advocacy of capitalism to mean anything, the proponents must
be able to finance their cause— to hold public meetings, publish
pamphlets, buy radio time, issue newspapers and magazines,

178 Essays on Individuality

and so on. How could they raise the funds? There might and
probably would be men in the socialist society with large in-
comes, perhaps even large capital sums in the form of govern-
ment bonds and the like, but these would of necessity be high
public officials. It is possible to conceive of a minor socialist
official retaining his job although openly advocating capitalism.
It stretches credulity to imagine the socialist top brass financ-
ing such "subversive" activities.

The only recourse for funds would be to raise small amounts
from a large number of minor officials. But this is no real an-
swer. To tap these sources, many people would already have to
be persuaded, and our whole problem is how to initiate and
finance a campaign to do so. Radical movements in capitalist
societies have never been financed this way. They have typi-
cally been supported by a few wealthy individuals who have
become persuaded— by a Frederick Vanderbilt Field, or an
Anita Blaine McCormick, or a Corliss Lamont, to mention a
few names recently prominent, or by a Friedrich Engels, to go
farther back. This is a role of inequality of wealth in preserving
political freedom that is seldom noted— the role of the patron.

In a capitalist society, it is only necessary to persuade a few
wealthy people to get funds to launch any idea, however
strange, and there are many such persons, many independent
foci of support. And, indeed, it is not even necessary to per-
suade people or financial institutions with available funds of
the soundness of the ideas to be propagated. It is only neces-
sary to persuade them that the propagation can be financially
successful; that the newspaper or magazine or book or other
venture will be profitable. The competitive publisher, for ex-
ample, cannot afford to publish only writings with which he
personally agrees; his touchstone must be the likelihood that
the market will be large enough to yield a satisfactory return
on his investment.

In this way, the market breaks the vicious circle and makes

Capitalism and Freedom 179

it possible ultimately to finance such ventures by small
amounts from many people without first persuading them.
There are no such possibilities in the socialist society; there is
only the all-powerful state.

Let us stretch our imagination and suppose that a socialist
government is aware of this problem and composed of people
anxious to preserve freedom. Could it provide the funds? Per-
haps, but it is difficult to see how. It could establish a bureau
for subsidizing subversive propaganda. But how could it choose
whom to support? If it gave to all who asked, it would shortly
find itself out of funds, for socialism cannot repeal the elemen-
tary economic law that a sufficiently high price will call forth
a large supply. Make the advocacy of radical causes sufficiently
remunerative, and the supply of advocates will be unlimited.

Moreover, freedom to advocate unpopular causes does not
require that such advocacy be without cost. On the contrary,
no society could be stable, if advocacy of radical change were
costless, much less subsidized. It is entirely appropriate that
men make sacrifices to advocate causes in which they deeply
believe. Indeed, it is important to preserve freedom only for
people who are willing to practice self-denial, for otherwise
freedom degenerates into license and irresponsibility. What is
essential is that the cost of advocating unpopular causes be
tolerable and not prohibitive.

But we are not yet through. In a free market society, it is
enough to have the funds. The suppliers of paper are as will-
ing to sell it to the Daily Worker as to the Wall Street Journal.
In a socialist society, it would not be enough to have the funds.
Our hypothetical capitalist organ would have to persuade the
government factory making paper to sell to them, the govern-
ment printing plant to print the paper, and so on.

Another example of the role of the market in preserving
political freedom, and one that is closer to home, was revealed
in our experience with McCarthyism. Entirely aside from the

1 80 Essays on Individuality

substantive issues involved, and the merits of the charges made,
what protection did individuals, and in particular government
employees, have against irresponsible accusations and prob-
ings into matters that it went against their conscience to re-
veal? Their appeal to the Fifth Amendment would have been
a hollow mockery without an alternative to government em-
ployment.

Their fundamental protection was the existence of a private
market economy in which they could earn a living. Here again,
the protection was not absolute. Many potential private em-
ployers were, rightly or wrongly, adverse to hiring those pil-
loried. It may well be that there was far less justification for
the costs imposed on many of the people involved than for
the costs generally imposed on people who advocate unpopular
causes. But the important point is that the costs were limited
and not prohibitive, as they would have been if government
employment had been the only possibility.

It is of interest to note that a disproportionately large frac-
tion of the people involved apparently went into the most
competitive sectors of the economy— small business, trade,
farming— where the market approaches most closely the ideal
free market. No one who buys bread knows whether the wheat
from which it is made was grown by a communist or a Repub-
lican, by a constitutionalist or a fascist, or, for that matter, by
a Negro or a white. This illustrates how an impersonal market
separates economic activities from political views and protects
men from being discriminated against in their economic activi-
ties for reasons that are irrelevant to their productivity—
whether these reasons are associated with their views or their
color.

As this example suggests, the groups in our society that have
the most at stake in the preservation and strengthening of
competitive capitalism are those minority groups which can
most easily become the object of the distrust and enmity of

Capitalism and Freedom 181

the majority— the Negroes, the Jews, the foreign born, to men-
tion only the most obvious. Yet, paradoxically enough, the
enemies of the free market— the socialists and communists-
have been recruited in disproportionate measure from these
groups. Instead of recognizing that the existence of the mar-
ket has protected them from the attitudes of their fellow
countrymen, they mistakenly attribute the residual discrimi-
nation to the market.

Absolute freedom is impossible. Men's freedoms can con-
flict and when they do, one man's freedom must be limited to
preserve another's. In addition, freedom is a tenable objective
only for responsible individuals. We do not believe in unre-
stricted freedom for madmen or children; for them, paternal-
ism is inescapable.

These qualifications on freedom as a sole and attainable ob-
jective make some departures in the direction of centralized
control and paternalism both inevitable and desirable. The
recognition of this fact should, however, be sharply distin-
guished from the superficially similar view that freedom is but
one of a number of equally important objectives. It is one
thing to recognize that anarchy is neither feasible nor desir-
able; that some restrictions on freedom are inevitable if the
essence of freedom is to be preserved. It is quite another to
regard such restrictions as desirable in their own right; to be-
lieve that it is appropriate to restrict the freedom of some adult
individuals, not to protect the freedom of others but rather
to protect these individuals themselves from "misusing" their
freedom. This is the view that has been regaining ground in
recent decades and that has led to the substitution of the ideal
of a "mixed economy" for the ideal of a free economy.

The believer in freedom is doctrinaire about his principles.
He should not be doctrinaire about specific proposals for in-
tervention of the state in economic affairs. His principles them-

182 Essays on Individuality

selves imply that some intervention is required to provide a
stable legal and monetary framework for the market and to
keep markets free by preventing private monopolies— whether
of industry or labor— from themselves becoming a source of
coercion. They imply also that some intervention may be re-
quired when market transactions have significant effects on
individuals who are not parties to them, and on paternalistic
grounds to protect the incompetent and to assure children an
opportunity to have effective freedom when they mature.

The principles of the believer in freedom also imply, how-
ever, that in making up his balance sheet for any proposed in-
tervention he must list among its liabilities that it encroaches
on the market. Thereby the intervention both directly reduces
the scope of freedom and indirectly threatens still further en-
croachment, by making it easier for enemies of freedom to
gain control. The individualist can accept intervention as
minor deviations from the general pattern but he should seek
to have even these as general and impersonal as possible.

And, above all, the individualist should keep constantly in
mind that the retention of a free market for the bulk of eco-
nomic activity is an essential precondition for anything like a
tolerable approximation to his ideal.

The Creative Powers of a Free
Civilization

by Friedrich A. Hayek

THE SOCRATIC MAXIM THAT THE RECOGNITION OF OUR IGNORANCE

is the beginning of wisdom has profound application to social
life. If we are to comprehend how society works we must first
become aware, not merely of our individual ignorance of most
of the particular circumstances which determine its actions,
but also of the necessary ignorance of man as such regarding
much or most that determines the course of his society.

It is no exaggeration to say that this unavoidable ignorance
of man concerning most of what affects his own action is the
most important single fact from which any attempt to under-
stand social life must start. This is so because the advantages
of social life, and particularly of those more advanced forms
of social life which we call civilization, rest on the paradox
that the individual can use more knowledge than he possesses.
It might well be said that civilization begins where the indi-
vidual can benefit from more knowledge than he can himself
acquire, and is able to cope with his ignorance by using knowl-
edge which he does not possess.

Our ignorance, however, is by its very nature the most diffi-
cult subject to discuss. At first it might even seem by definition
impossible to talk sense about it. We cannot discuss intelli-
gently something about which we know nothing. We must
at least be able to formulate the questions to which we do not

183

184 Essays on Individuality

know the answers. For this purpose we must possess some
generic knowledge about the kind of thing, or the kind of
world, we are talking about. If we are to understand how
society works we must in this manner recognize at least the
fact and the range of our ignorance. Though we cannot see
in the dark, to understand our conduct we must at least be
able to trace the limits of the dark areas.

The crucial facts come out clearly if we consider for a mo-
ment the significance both of the common assertion that man
has created his civilization, and of the conclusion often drawn
that, since man has made his institutions, he can also change
them as he pleases. This conclusion would be justified only if
man had deliberately created civilization in full understanding
of what he was doing, or if he at least fully comprehended how
it was being maintained. In one sense it is, of course, true that
man has made his civilization. It is the result of his actions, or
rather of the actions of some hundreds of generations. But
this does not mean that civilization is the product of human
design, that man has aimed at what he produced, or even that
he knows how it came to be what it is or on what its function-
ing and continued existence depends.

The whole conception that man, already endowed with a
mind capable of conceiving civilization, set out to create that
civilization as it was already pre-formed in his mind, is funda-
mentally false. Man does not simply impose upon nature a
pre-formed mental pattern. His mind is itself a pattern con-
stantly changing as a result of his endeavor to adapt himself
to his surroundings. It is equally misleading to think that to
achieve a higher civilization we have merely to put into effect
the ideas now guiding us. If we are to advance there must be
room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and
ideals as a result of further experience. We are as little able
to conceive what civilization will be, or can be, five hundred

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 185

or even fifty years hence as medieval man, or even our grand-
parents, were able to foresee our own manner of life.

The whole conception of man deliberately building his civili-
zation stems from an erroneous intellectualism which treats
human reason as something standing outside nature and pos-
sessed of knowledge or reasoning capacity independent of ex-
perience. But the growth of the human mind is part of the
growth of civilization and it is the state of civilization at any
moment that determines the scope and the possibilities of
human values. The mind cannot foresee its own advance.
Though we must always strive for the achievement of our pres-
ent aims, we must also leave scope for new experiences and
future events to decide which of those aims will be achieved.
We must not go to the extreme position of some modern
anthropologists when they argue "that it is not man who con-
trols culture but the other way around." But it is certainly
useful to be reminded that "it is only our profound and com-
prehensive ignorance of the nature of culture that makes it
possible for us to believe that we direct and control it." ' This
view is at least a needed corrective of the intellectualist con-
ception, a corrective that helps us to see more clearly the in-
cessant interaction between our conscious intellectual striving
for what our intellect pictures as achievable and the network
of institutions, habits, and beliefs, within which something
very different from what we have aimed at is produced.

To point the argument, let us for the moment disregard
what has been our chief point so far, namely how far man's
mind is a product of the civilization in which he has grown
up— and how little his conscious mind is aware of the experi-
ence, which he actually employs, since it is embodied in the
habits, conventions, language, and morals which are part of
our make-up. Even so the magnitude of our individual igno-

1 L. A. White, "Man's Control of Civilization: an Anthropomorphic Illusion,"
Scientific Monthly, 66, 1948, pp. 238-9.

186 Essays on Individuality

ranee of most of the circumstances that enable us to achieve
our aims is simply staggering, once we begin to reflect upon it.
Or, to put this differently: It is largely because civilization
enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we in-
dividually do not possess, and because each individual's use of
his particular knowledge may serve to assist in the achieve-
ment of their ends by others unknown to him, that man as a
member of civilized society can pursue his individual ends so
much more successfully than he could alone. We know little
of the particular facts to which the whole of social activity
must continuously adjust itself in order to provide what we
have learnt to expect. We know even less of the forces which
bring about this adjustment by appropriately coordinating in-
dividual activity. Indeed, our attitude, when we discover how
little we know of what makes us cooperate, is on the whole
one of resentment rather than of wonder or curiosity. Much
of our occasional impetuous desire to smash the whole en-
tangling machinery of civilization is due to this inability of
man to understand what he is doing.

Civilization is built on the utilization of experience, ac-
quired by countless individuals and generations and passed on
through a process of communication and transmission of
knowledge. The identification of the growth of civilization
and the growth of knowledge which this suggests would be
very misleading, however, if by "knowledge" we meant solely
the conscious, explicit knowledge of individuals, the knowl-
edge which means that we are able to state that this or that is
so and so.2 It would be still more misleading if knowledge were
confined to scientific knowledge and it is important for the
understanding of the further argument to remember that, con-

2 See G. Ryle, "Knowing How and Knowing That," Proceedings of the Aris-
totelian Society, 1945-6.

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 187

trary to a fashionable view,3 scientific knowledge does not ex-
haust even all the explicit and conscious knowledge of which
society makes constant use. The scientific methods of the
search for knowledge are not suitable for satisfying all the
needs for explicit knowledge on which the functioning of so-
ciety is based.

Not all the knowledge of the ever changing particular facts,
of the conditions of time and place of which man makes
continuous use, lends itself to organization or centralized reg-
istration: much of it exists only dispersed among countless
individuals. The same applies to that great part of expert knowl-
edge which is not substantive knowledge but merely knowl-
edge of where and how to find the needed information. I have
discussed these different kinds of knowledge elsewhere, espe-
cially in an article in Schweizer Monatshefte (October, 1956).
But for our present purposes it is not this distinction between
different kinds of rational knowledge which is most important
and we shall include all these different kinds when we speak
of explicit knowledge.

The growth of knowledge and the growth of civilization are
the same only' if we interpret knowledge to include all the
human adaptations to environment in which past experience
has been incorporated. Not all knowledge in this sense is part
of our intellect and our intellect is not the whole of our knowl-
edge. Our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools
and our institutions— all are in this sense more or less effective
adaptations formed by past experience, that have grown up
by selective elimination of less suitable conduct and which
are as much an indispensable foundation of successful action
as is our conscious knowledge. Not all these non-rational fac-
tors underlying our action are always conducive to success.

3 Compare the often quoted observation of F. P. Ramsay, The Foundations oi
Mathematics (Cambridge, 1925), p. 287: "There is nothing to know except
science."

188 Essays on Individuality

Many of them may be retained long after they have outlived
their usefulness and even when they have become more an
obstacle than a help. Nevertheless, we could not do without
them: even successful employment of our intellect itself rests
on their constant use.

Man prides himself on the increase of his knowledge. But
as a result of what he himself has created, the limitations of
his conscious knowledge and therefore the range of ignorance
significant for his conscious action have constantly increased.
Ever since the beginning of modern science the best minds
have recognized "that the range of acknowledged ignorance
will grow with the advance of science." 4 Unfortunately, the
popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seem-
ingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignor-
ance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at
more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human ac-
tivities. Even more important is the fact that as civilization
grows, individual man knows less and less about the man-made
environment on which he more and more depends.

I have spoken of the transmission and communication of
knowledge in order to point to two different aspects of the
process of civilization. One is transmission in time, the hand-
ing on from generation to generation of an accumulated stock
of knowledge. The other is communication among contem-
poraries of information on which they base their actions. These
two aspects cannot be sharply separated, because the various
means of communication between contemporaries are among
the most important parts of the cultural heritage, of the trans-
mitted tools which man, without understanding them, con-
stantly uses in the pursuit of his ends.

This is familiar so far as it applies to the process of accumu-
lation and transmission of that abstract, conscious knowledge
which we call science, and also with regard to our awareness

4 G. de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago, 1955), p. 34.

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 189

of the concrete features of the world in which we live— the
"geography" of our surroundings. But this is only a part,
though the most conspicuous part, of the inherited stock of
experience and it is the only part of which we necessarily
"know," in the ordinary sense of the word. Yet we are better
equipped to deal with our surroundings also because of the
many "tools" other than conscious knowledge which we pos-
sess—tools the human race has evolved by a process of learn-
ing and handing on of the results. I stress the results here be-
cause the ever-better tools that have been passed on to suc-
cessive generations embody only the results of experience with-
out the whole of the experience being transmitted. Once the
more efficient tool is available it will be used without the user
knowing why it is better or even what the alternatives are.

In this sense the "tools" which man has evolved, and which
are such an important part of his adaptation to his environ-
ment, do not consist solely of material implements, nor even
of kinds of conduct that he individually uses as means for a
purpose. Man is in a large measure ignorant not only of why
he uses some tools rather than others, but also of what de-
pends on his actions, of how far the results which he achieves
are conditioned by conforming to habits of which he is un-
aware. This applies to civilized man not less but perhaps even
more than to primitive man. With the growth of conscious
knowledge there has been an equally important accumulation
of tools in this wider sense, of tested and generally adopted
ways of doing things. An advanced civilization and all the ac-
tivities of civilized man, including his rational thought, de-
pend as much on the unreflected use of these procedures as
do the simplest kinds of human life.5

5 In this connection compare the profound observation of A. N. Whitehead
(Introduction to Mathematics, 1911, p. 61) that "civilization advances by
extending the number of important operations which we can perform without
thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle
— they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only
be made at decisive moments."

loo Essays on Individuality

For the moment, however, we will consider not so much
the knowledge thus handed down to us, as the manner in
which current experience is utilized. This comprises, of course,
the formation of new tools that can be used in the future; but
above all it includes the help we get from the current experi-
ence of other people. Through this the dispersed knowledge
and skill, and the varied habits and opportunities of all the
members of society, combine in bringing about an adjustment
of the activities of society to changing circumstances. So far
as it is possible to separate these two aspects, current adjust-
ment and change, we shall leave "progress" aside here and
concentrate on those adjustments that must take place con-
tinuously merely to maintain civilization.

Every man who participates in civilization constantly bene-
fits from current human experience which is not his own, and
is led at the same time to take part in a process of adaptation
to ever-changing circumstances of most of which he knows
little. Yet in these changes the whole structure of society must
share if it is to continue to exist. The persistence of an order
through continuous change is based on a division and com-
bination of knowledge among different persons, an aggregate
of different sorts of knowledge the whole of which no single
person can command.

Every change in conditions will make necessary some change
in the use of resources, in the direction and kind of human
activities, in habits and practices. And each change in the ac-
tions of those affected in the first instance will require further
adjustments that will gradually extend through the whole of
society. Every change thus in a sense creates a "problem" for
society, even though no single individual perceives it as such;
it is gradually "solved" by the establishment of a new overall
adjustment. Those who take part in the process have little
idea why they are doing what they do, and we have no way of
predicting who will at each step first make the appropriate

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 191

move or what particular combinations of knowledge and skill,
personal attitudes and circumstances will suggest to some man
the successful answer or by what channels his example will be
transmitted to others who will follow the lead. It is difficult
to conceive all the combinations of knowledge and skills which
thus come into action, and from which arise the discovery of
appropriate practices or devices that once found can be ac-
cepted generally. But the countless number of humble steps
taken by anonymous persons, in the course of doing familiar
things in changed circumstances, set the examples that pre-
vail as the best after many have tried in their own way. They
are as important as the major intellectual innovations which
are explicitedly recognized and communicated as such.

Who will prove to possess the right combination of apti-
tudes and opportunities to find the better way is just as little
predictable as by what manner or process different kinds of
knowledge and skill will combine to bring about solution of
the problem. The successful combination of knowledge and
aptitude does not, of course, normally result from people ''put-
ting their heads together"— from any process of thinking out
in common the solution of their task. It results rather from
imitation of what we have seen others do in similar circum-
stances and from an effort to improve upon their actions; from
individual response to symbols or signs such as changes in
prices or expressions of moral or esthetic esteem; from observ-
ing standards of conduct; in short, from using results of the
experiences of others, past and present. The method by which
only selected elements of relevant knowledge are brought to
the different individuals who base their decisions upon them,
rests on factors which as a whole are as little known to any-
body as all the circumstances which can be communicated by
them.

What is essential to the functioning of the process is that
each individual is able to act on his particular knowledge,

192 Essays on Individuality

always unique at least so far as the knowledge of some particu-
lar circumstances is concerned; that he may use his individual
skills and opportunities within the limits known to him and
for his own individual purpose.

We have now reached the point at which the main conten-
tion of this essay should be readily intelligible. It is that the
case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of
the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning
a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our
ends and welfare depend.

If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only
all that affects the attainment of our present wishes but also
all our future wants and desires, then there would be little case
for liberty— while liberty of the individual, in turn, would of
course make complete foresight impossible. Liberty is essen-
tial in order to leave room for the unforeseeable and unpre-
dictable: we want it because we have learnt to expect from it
the opportunity of realizing many of our aims. It is because
every individual knows so little, and in particular because we
rarely know which of us knows best, that we trust the inde-
pendent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emerg-
ence of what we shall want when we see it.

Humiliating to human pride as the insight may be, we must
recognize that we owe the advance and even the preservation
of civilization to a maximum of opportunity for accidents to
happen. These accidents occur in the combination of knowl-
edge and attitudes, skills and habits acquired by individual
men, and also in the confrontation of qualified men with the
particular circumstances with which they are equipped to deal.
Our necessary ignorance of so much means that we have to
deal largely with probabilities and chances.

Of course, it is true of social as of individual life that favor-
able accidents usually do not just happen. We must prepare

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 193

for them. But still they remain chances and do not become
certainties. They involve risks deliberately taken, the misfor-
tunes of individuals and groups who are as meritorious as
others who prosper, the possibility of serious failure or relapse
even for the majority, and merely a high probability of a net
gain on balance. All we can do is to heighten the chance that
some special constellation of individual equipment and cir-
cumstance will result in the shaping of some new tool (in the
wide sense in which we have used the word) or the improve-
ment of an old one, and increase the prospect that such inno-
vations will become rapidly known to those who can take
advantage of them.

Man learns by the disappointment of expectations. Of course
we should not add elements of unpredictability by foolish hu-
man institutions, in which case the stultification of our efforts
would teach us nothing significant. We should, rather, im-
prove human institutions with the aim of increasing the possi-
bility of correct foresight. But we should above all provide the
maximum of opportunity for unknown individuals to learn
facts of which we are yet unaware and opportunity to use this
knowledge in their actions. For the achievement of our ends
depends on forces which we do not know in detail and whose
operation we understand only to a small degree.

It is in the utilization, in the mutually adjusted efforts of
different people, of more knowledge than anyone possesses or
than it is possible intellectually to synthetize, that achieve-
ments emerge that are greater than any one man's mind can
foresee. We sometimes forget that freedom means the re-
nunciation of direct control of individual efforts and the limi-
tation of coercion to the enforcement of abstract rules. It is
because of this renunciation of the use of coercion for the
achievement of specific ends that a free society can make use

194 Essays on Individuality

of so much more knowledge than the mind of any ruler can
comprehend.

From this foundation of the argument for liberty it follows
that we shall not achieve its ends if we confine liberty to the
particular instances where we know it will do good. Freedom
granted only where it can be known beforehand that its effects
will be beneficial would not be freedom. If we knew how free-
dom would be used, the case for it would largely disappear.
We could then achieve the same result by telling people to
do what freedom would enable them to do. But we shall never
get the benefits of freedom, never obtain those unforeseeable
new developments for which it provides the opportunity, if
it is not granted also where the uses made of it by some do
not seem desirable. It is therefore no argument against indi-
vidual freedom that it is frequently abused or used for ends
that are recognized as socially undesirable. Our faith in free-
dom rests not on demonstrable results in particular circum-
stances, but on the belief that it will on balance release more
forces for the good than for the bad.

It also follows that the importance of freedom to do par-
ticular things has nothing to do with the question of whether
we or the majority are ever likely to make use of that particular
possibility. To grant no more freedom than all can exercise
would be completely to misconceive its function. The freedom
that will be used by only one man in a million may be more
important to society and more beneficial to the majority than
any freedom we all use.6

6 H. Rashdall, "The Philosophical Theory of Properly," Property, Its Rights
and Duties (New York and London, 1915), p. 62: "The plea for liberty is not
sufficiently met by insisting, as has been so eloquently and humorously done
by Mr. Lowes Dickinson (Justice and Libertv: a Political Dialogue, 1908, e.g.
pp. 129, 131), upon the absurdity of supposing that the propertyless laborer
under the ordinary capitalistic regime enjoys any liberty of which socialism
would deprive him. For it may be of extreme importance that some should
enjoy liberty — that it should be possible for some few men to be able to dis-
pose of their time in their own way — although such liberty may be neither

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 195

Indeed, it might almost be said that freedom to do a par-
ticular thing is the more precious for society as a whole the
less likely the opportunity for its use. The less likely it is that
the opportunity will occur, the more unlikely also that the
experience to be gained will be recovered if such a nearly
unique chance is missed. It is also probably true that the ma-
jority is not directly interested in most of the things it is most
important that we should be free to do. If it were otherwise,
the results of freedom could also be achieved by the majority
deciding what should be done by the individuals. But ma-
jority action is of necessity confined to the already tried and
ascertained, to issues on which agreement has already been
reached in that process of discussion that must be preceded
by different experiences and actions on the part of the dif-
ferent individuals.

The benefits I derive from freedom are thus largely the re-
sult of the uses of freedom by others, and mostly of uses of
freedom that I myself could never make. It is therefore not
merely and not even mainly the freedom which I can exercise
myself which is important for me. It may even be that in
many ways freedom for others is more important for us than
freedom for ourselves, and it is certainly more important that
anything can be tried by somebody than that all can do the
same things. It is not because we like to be able to do particu-
lar things, not because we regard any particular freedom as
essential to our happiness, that we have a claim to freedom.
The instinct that makes us revolt against any physical restraint,
though a helpful ally, is not always a safe guide for justifying
or delimiting freedom. What is important is not what free-
dom I personally would like to exercise but what freedom
some odd person may need in order to do things beneficial to

possible nor desirable for the great majority. That culture requires a consider-
able differentiation in social conditions is also a principle of unquestionable
importance."

196 Essays on Individuality

society, a freedom we can assure to this unknown single per-
son only by giving it to all.

The benefits of freedom are therefore not confined to the
free— or it is at least not by those aspects of freedom that each
man himself uses that he mainly benefits. There can be no
doubt that in history unfree majorities have benefitted from
the existence of free minorities, and that to-day unfree socie-
ties benefit and even maintain their cultural level by what
they obtain and learn from free societies. Of course, the bene-
fits we derive from the freedom of others are greater as the
number of those who can exercise freedom increases. The
argument for the freedom of some therefore applies to the
freedom of all. But it is still better for all that some should
be free than none, or that more should be free than fewer.
The point to recognize is that the importance of the freedom
to do a particular thing has nothing to do with the number
of people who want to do it; it might almost be said to be in
inverse proportion. One lesson we must draw from these con-
siderations is that a society may be hamstrung by controls
although the great majority may not be aware that their free-
dom is significantly curtailed. If we proceeded on the assump-
tion that only the freedoms the majority will exercise are im-
portant we would be certain to create a stagnant society with
all the characteristics of unfreedom.

The undesigned "new" factors that constantly emerge in
the process of adaptation consist in the first instance of new
arrangements or patterns in which the efforts of different in-
dividuals are coordinated, and of new constellations in the
use of our resources, which are in their nature as temporary as
the changed conditions that have evoked them. There will,
also, be modifications of tools and institutions adapted to the
new circumstances. Some of these will be purely temporary
adaptations to the conditions of the moment, while others

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 197

will prove to be improvements, increasing the versatility of the
existing tools and usages, and will therefore be retained. They
constitute a better adaptation not merely to the particular cir-
cumstances of time and place but to some permanent feature
of our environment. In such spontaneous "formations" 7 is
embodied a perception of the general laws that govern nature.
Parallel with this cumulative embodiment of experience in
tools and forms of action will go a growth of explicit knowl-
edge, of formulated generic rules that can be communicated
by language from person to person.

This process by which the new emerges is relatively best
known and most readily comprehensible— though still inade-
quately appreciated— in the intellectual sphere where the re-
sults are new ideas. It is the field in which most people are
aware at least of some of the individual steps of the process,
where we necessarily know of what is happening and where
the necessity of freedom is consequently fairly generally un-
derstood. Most scientists realize that we cannot plan the ad-
vance of knowledge, that in the voyage into the unknown
which the enterprise of research always is, we are in great
measure dependent on the vagaries of individual genius and
of circumstances, and that, though a new idea will spring up
in a single mind, it will be the result of a combination of con-
cepts, habits, and circumstances brought to one person by
society, the result of lucky accidents as much as of systematic
effort.

Because we are necessarily aware that our advances in the
intellectual sphere spring often from the unforeseen and un-
designed, we tend to overstress the relative importance of free-
dom in this field compared with the importance of the free-
dom of doing things. But the freedom of research and belief,

7 For the use of this term, more appropriate in this connection than the usual
"institutions," see my study on The Counter-Revolution of Science, 1952,
p. 83.

198 Essays on Individuality

and of speech and discussion, the importance of which most
people recognize, refers only to the last stage of the process
in which new truths are discovered. It would be like treating
the crowning part of an edifice as the whole of it if we were
to extol the value of intellectual liberty at the expense of the
value of the liberty of doing things. If we have new ideas to
discuss, different views to adjust, it is because these ideas and
views arise from the efforts of individuals in ever-new circum-
stances, availing themselves in their concrete tasks of the new
tools and forms of action of which they have learnt. The in-
tellectualist view that stresses exclusively the formation of
abstract and generic ideas is a consequence of the fact that
this part of the process of the advance of knowledge is the
most obvious and the one with which those who think about
its nature are most familiar and in which they have a special
interest.

The non-intellectual part of the same process, the formation
of the changed material environment in which the new
emerges, requires for its understanding and appreciation a
much greater effort of imagination. We may sometimes be
able to reconstruct the intellectual processes that have led to
a new idea, but we can scarcely ever hope to reconstruct the
sequence and combination of the contributions that did not
consist in the acquisition of new explicit knowledge— all the
favorable habits and skills employed, the facilities and oppor-
tunities used, and the particular environment of the main
actors that has brought about the result. Our efforts toward
understanding that part of the process can go little further
than showing on simplified models the kind of forces that are
at work, the general principle rather than the specific charac-
ter of the influences that operate.8 In the nature of the thing
each man can always be concerned only with what he does

8 Compare my article on "Degrees of Explanation," British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, November, 1955.

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 199

know. Therefore, those features which, while the process is
under way, are not consciously known to anybody, are com-
monly disregarded and can perhaps never be traced in detail.

In fact, these unconscious features are not only commonly
disregarded but are often treated as if they were a hindrance
rather than a help or an essential condition. Because they are
not "rational" in the sense of explicitly entering into our
process of reasoning, they are often treated as irrational in the
sense of being contrary to intelligent action. Yet, though much
of the non-rational that affects our action may also be in this
sense irrational, many of the "mere habits" and "meaningless
institutions" that we unquestioningly use and presuppose in
our actions are essential conditions for what we achieve, suc-
cessful adaptations of society that are constantly improved and
on which the range of what we can achieve depends. While
it is important to discover their defects, we could not for a
moment go on without constantly relying on them.

The manner in which we have learnt to order our day, to
dress, to eat and arrange our houses, to speak, write and use
the countless tools and implements of civilization, no less
than the "know-how" used in production and trade, all furnish
us constantly with the foundations on which our own contribu-
tions to the process of civilization must be based. And it is in
the new use and improvement of whatever the facilities of
civilization offer to us that the new ideas arise which are ulti-
mately handled in the intellectual sphere. Though the con-
scious manipulation of abstract thought, once it has been set
in train, has in some measure a life of its own, it would not
long continue and develop without the constant challenges
that do not originate in the intellectual sphere but which
arise from the ability of people to act in a new manner, trying
new ways of doing things and altering the whole structure of
civilization in adaptation to change. The intellectual process
is in effect only a process of elaboration, selection, and elimi-

200 Essays on Individuality

nation of conscious ideas already formed. But the flow of new
ideas to a great extent surges up from the sphere in which
action, often non-rational action, and material events impinge
upon each other. It would dry up if freedom were confined to
the intellectual sphere.

Thus, the importance of freedom does not depend on the
elevated character of the activities that it makes possible. Free-
dom of action, even action in humble things, is as important
as freedom of thought and freedom of belief. It has become
a common practice to disparage liberty of action by calling it
"economic liberty." But not only is the concept of liberty of
action much wider than that of the economic liberty which
it includes; what is more important, it is very questionable
whether actions which can be called purely economic exist in
this sense, and whether any restrictions on liberty can be con-
fined to what are called merely economic aspects. Economic
considerations are merely the process by which we endeavor
to reconcile and adjust our different purposes, which in the
last resort are all not economic (or nearly all: excepting only
those of the miser or the man to whom making money has
become an end in itself).

Most of what has been said so far applies not only to man's
use of the means for the achievement of his ends but also to
these ends themselves. It is one of the essential characteristics
of a free society that its goals are open, that new ends of con-
scious effort can spring up, first with a few individuals or a
small minority, to become in time the ends of all or most.

We must recognize that even what we regard as good or
beautiful is changeable, if not in any recognizable manner that
could entitle us to take any kind of relativist position, yet in
the sense that in many ways we do not know what will appear
as good or beautiful to another generation; we do not know
why we regard this or that as good, or who is right when people

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 201

differ on whether something is good or not. It is not only in
his knowledge, but also in his aims and values, that man is the
creature of the process of civilization, and in the last resort
it is the significance of these individual wishes for the perpetu-
ation of the group or the species that will determine whether
they will persist or change. It is of course a mistake to believe
that we can draw conclusions about what our values ought to
be, because we realize that they are a product of evolution.
But we cannot reasonably doubt that these values are created
and altered by the same evolutionary forces that have pro-
duced our intelligence. All that we can know is that the ulti-
mate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will
be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disap-
pearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" be-
liefs.

It is in the pursuit of man's aims of the moment that all the
devices of civilization have to prove themselves; that the in-
effective is discarded and the efficient handed on. But there is
more to it than the fact that new ends constantly arise with
the satisfaction of old needs and with the appearance of new
opportunities. Which individuals, and which groups, succeed
and continue to exist depends as much on the goals which they
pursue, the values that govern their action, as on the tools and
capacities at their command. A group may prosper or be ex-
tinguished just as much because of the ethical code it obeys,
or because of the ideals of beauty or well-being that guide it,
as because of the degree to which it has learned or not learned
to satisfy its material needs. Within any given society particu-
lar groups may rise or sink because of the ends they pursue
and the standards of conduct which they observe. And the
ends of the successful group will tend to become the ends of
all members of the society.

At most we understand only partially why the values we
hold, or the ethical rules we observe, are conducive to the con-

202 Essays on Individuality

tinued existence of our society. Nor, under continuously
changing conditions, can we be sure that all the rules that
have proved themselves as conducive to that purpose will re-
main so. Though there is a presumption that any established
social standard contributes in some manner to the preserva-
tion of a civilization, our only way of knowing this is to ascer-
tain whether it continues to prove itself in competition with
other standards tried by other individuals or groups.

The competition, on which the process of selection rests,
must be understood in the widest sense of the term. It is as
much a competition between organized and unorganized groups
as a competition among individuals. To think of the process
in contrast to cooperation or organization would be to mis-
conceive its nature. The endeavor to achieve specific results
by cooperation and organization is as much a part of competi-
tion as are individual efforts, and successful group relations
also prove their efficiency in competition between groups or-
ganized on different principles. The distinction relevant here
is not between individual and group action but between ar-
rangements in which alternative ways based on different views
and habits may be tried, and, on the other hand, arrange-
ments in which one agency has the exclusive rights and the
power to coerce others to keep out of the field. It is only when
such exclusive rights are granted, on the presumption of su-
perior knowledge of particular individuals or groups, that the
process ceases to be experimental and the beliefs that happen
to be prevalent at the moment tend to become a main obstacle
to the advancement of knowledge.

Thus the argument for liberty is not an argument against
organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human
reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privi-
leged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion
to prevent others from doing better. Every organization is

The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization 203

based on given knowledge, and even an organization designed
to increase knowledge can be effective only in so far as the
knowledge and beliefs on which the design of the organiza-
tion rests are correct. In so far as any facts not yet known con-
tradict the beliefs on which the structure of the organization is
based, this can show itself only in its failure and supersession
by a different type of organization. Organization is likely to
be beneficial and effective so long as it is voluntary and is em-
bedded in a free sphere, either adjusting itself to circumstances
not taken into account in its conception, or failing. To turn the
whole of society into a single organization built and directed
according to a single plan would be to extinguish the forces
that have formed the very reason that planned it.

It is worth a moment's reflection as to what would happen if
only what was agreed upon to be the best knowledge of society
were to be used in any action. If all attempts that seemed
wasteful in the light of the now generally accepted knowledge
were prohibited and only such questions asked, or such experi-
ments tried, as seemed significant in the light of ruling opin-
ion. Mankind might then well reach a point where its knowl-
edge allowed it adequately to predict the consequences of all
conventional actions and where no disappointment or failure
would occur. Man would seem to have subjected his surround-
ings to his reason because nothing of which he could not pre-
dict the results would be done. We might conceive of a civili-
zation thus coming to a standstill, not because the possibilities
of further growth had been exhausted, but because man had
succeeded in so completely subjecting all his actions and his
immediate surroundings to his existing state of knowledge that
no occasion would arise for new knowledge to appear.

The rationalist who desires to subject everything to human
reason is faced with a real dilemma. The use of reason aims at
control and predictability. But the process of the advance of

204 Essays on Individuality

reason rests on freedom and the unpredictability of human
action. Those who extol the powers of human reason usually
see only one side of that intermingling of thought and action
in which reason is at the same time used and formed. They
do not see that for advancement the social process from which
the advances of reason emerge must remain free from its con-
trol!

There can be little doubt that man owes some of his great-
est successes in the past to the fact that he has not been able to
control social life. His continued success may well depend on
his deliberately refraining from exercising controls now in his
power. In the past, the spontaneous forces of growth, how-
ever much restricted, usually asserted themselves even against
the organized coercion of the State. With the technological
means of control now at the disposal of government it is no
longer certain that this assertion is possible; soon, at least, it
may be impossible.

The necessity of cultivating individual freedom as a deliber-
ate aim of policy, rather than treating it as something that has
to be tolerated because it cannot be prevented, has become
greater than ever. We are not far from the point at which the
deliberately organized forces of society may snuff out those
spontaneous forces on which all advance depends.

Individuality in American History

by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

THE HISTORIAN, TOGETHER WITH OTHER STUDENTS OF MODERN

society, cannot fail to be impressed with the strength of the
world-wide pressures working against freedom for the indi-
vidual. Yet he is also constantly reminded, perhaps more than
others, that individuality has been one of the historic char-
acteristics of human nature in general and of the American
personality in particular. Though much weakened in recent
decades, individualism has played a major role in American
life. This fact alone would seem to suggest caution before we
relegate it to the scrap heap of discarded or outmoded ideas.

Like other important attributes of our character and civili-
zation, individuality or individualism is an outgrowth of many
forces. More specifically, and rather obviously, it is a product
of inheritance and environment— the experience of Europe and
the hope of America. It is, of course, beyond the scope of this
paper, or the ability of its author, to trace through all history
the conflict between the demands of society and the urgings
of individuality. Something of this conflict has probably al-
ways affected human personality, but individuality as it has
developed in the United States goes back most directly to
English history and experience.

Among the legacies handed down from Britain to the Ameri-
can colonies was recognition of the importance of political
and religious freedom for the individual. The English people
had come to pride themselves on their love of liberty and hos-

205

206 Essays on Individuality

tility to arbitrary power. Essential to the English political tra-
dition was the belief that individuals had certain natural rights
which no government could violate with impunity. This tra-
dition, reinforced by the revolutions of the seventeenth century,
was most eloquently expressed in the writings of John Locke.
This philosopher of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, also
espoused a policy of religious toleration; and the natural rights
and privileges of the individual, political and religious, though
imperfectly respected in the mother country, were considered
a part of the person of the Englishman, to be taken wherever
he went. These rights accordingly were included in the charters
granted to the American colonies by Great Britain.

In the new American colonial environment, the struggle to
subdue the untamed wilderness, and the opportunities held
out at the same time by a seemingly limitless western frontier,
were both a stimulus and a potential reward to individual en-
terprise. An abundance of free, or near-free, soil offered
unique economic advantages, and European feudal customs
of restricted land tenure proved impossible to maintain in the
New World. The great natural resources and wealth of Amer-
ica encouraged not only economic individualism or hissez
hire, but provided also an atmosphere friendly to political and
religious liberty. Thus American individualism, rooted in the
philosophy of natural rights and expressed in the concepts of
limited government and religious toleration, was amply rein-
forced by the ever-widening opportunities of day-to-day life in
the New World.

Born in the Old World, but nurtured in the New, individu-
alism was an essential feature in the growth of American de-
mocracy. On the whole, the colonial period was one of progress
toward democracy along individualist lines, and in the Ameri-
can Revolution patriots stressed the negative side of govern-
ment, seeking emanicipation from British restrictions on trade
and commerce. The Declaration of Independence appealed to

Individuality in American History 207

the rights of man, while the new state constitutions with their
bills of rights put into practical application the philosophy of
the Declaration. "In every instance in these early state consti-
tutions/' as J. B. MacMaster wrote,

The state is presented as created by the people, and existing
solely for the good of the individual. Its sole duty is stated to
be to protect him in the full enjoyment of his natural and
inalienable rights. Public officials are declared to be the trus-
tees of the people; the right of revolution is inherent in soci-
ety. In no instance is the state presented as the provider of
office, the creator of monopolies.

The Federal Constitution, drafted in 1787, was an example
of the post-Revolutionary trend away from eighteenth-century
individualism toward greater centralization and concentration
of power in the hands of government. But the Constitution
also set forth the framework of limited government with its
separation of powers and with the addition later of the Bill of
Rights. While such a system of checks and balances reflected a
distrust of popular democracy, it also served to guard against
the danger of tyranny or the assumption of despotic authority.
In the new national government, both Hamiltonian Federal-
ists and Jeffersonian Republicans subscribed to the theory of
the natural rights of the individual, but it was Jefferson who
was the great exemplar of individuality in his political philoso-
phy. According to the Jeffersonian agrarian view of society,
property widely diffused and devoted largely to agricultural
pursuits, gave the type of security to the individual which
formed the very basis of democratic government.

Jefferson's emphasis upon the self-sufficient individual, liv-
ing in a self-contained community with widespread ownership
of land and commensurate economic advantages, was justified
by the New England town as well as by the American fron-
tier. But within Jefferson's own lifetime the American environ-

208 Essays on Individuality

ment, originally so well-suited to individualism, underwent a
partial transformation. Negro slavery, with its denial of full
individuality in the human personality, became more tightly
fastened upon the South. Then, immediately after the War
of 1812, and even more in the Jacksonian era, old agrarian
ideals began to suffer the competition of new concentrations
of wealth, power, and population. A commercial and manufac-
turing aristocracy vied for supremacy with the enfranchised
urban masses, while the frontier spirit became identified with
a crude conception of manifest destiny, in which the rights of
Indians, Mexicans, and others were brushed aside.

Although the industrial revolution had not yet entered its
main phase in the United States in the period before the Civil
War, transcendentalists and romantics in assaying its effects
already foresaw the dire consequences of the factory system for
their prized individuality and Emersonian self-reliance. Tho-
reau's protest against industrialism was, of course, the most
thoroughgoing. The author of Walden and of Civil Disobedi-
ence summed up his feelings when he complained bitterly of
the approaching day when huckleberries would have to be pur-
chased in a store instead of being picked at will from the fields.
"I suspect," he wrote in his Journal for August 6, 1858,

that the inhabitants of England and of the Continent of
Europe have thus lost their natural rights with the increase of
population and of monopolies. The wild fruits of the earth
disappear before civilization, or are only to be found in large
markets. The whole country becomes, as it were, a town or
beaten common, and the fruits left are a few hips and haws.

In the decades before the Civil War, American political
democracy was already beginning to diverge from the indi-
vidualist tenets of Jefferson and other eighteenth-century
philosopher statesmen. Under Andrew Jackson, democracy
was equated with majority rule, while individuals and minori-

Individuality in American History 209

ties were faced with the loss of time-honored natural rights.
The issue, as Alexis de Tocqueville clearly pointed out, was
not the denial of majority rule, but rather a concern lest the
majority fail to protect the rights of minorities and individuals.
Fearing that if ever free institutions were destroyed in the
United States it would be by the tyranny of the majority, Toc-
queville declared: "I know of no country in which there is so
little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as
in America." *

Distinguishing between freedom for the individual and the
American stress upon equality, Tocqueville observed that the
love of equality and hatred of privileges, even the slightest,
lead to the demand that all rights and privileges be concen-
trated in the hands of the government. These are then dis-
pensed to the citizenry as a matter of governmental favor or
largesse. A strong central government requires uniformity and
equality at the expense of individuality and dissent. While
this might contribute to such social and collective undertakings
as war, it could also lead to a type of popular servitude in which
the "will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and
guided. . . ."

The more equal the conditions of men become and the less
strong men individually are, the more easily they give way to
the current of the multitude and the more difficult it is for
them to adhere by themselves to an opinion which the multi-
tude discard. . . .

As the conditions of men become equal among a people,
individuals seem of less and society of greater importance; or
rather every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in
the crowd, and nothing stands conspicuous but the great and
imposing image of the people at large. This naturally gives
the men of democratic periods a lofty opinion of the privi-

1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley ( New
York: Knopf, 1945), I, 2636*.

2io Essays on Individuality

leges of society and a very humble notion of the rights of

in-

dividuals

Since the time of the Civil War, the traditional individuality
of the American character has come more and more into ques-
tion. While this decline of individualism has frequently been
deplored, it has even more frequently been regarded as inevi-
table. For the United States, as well as for Europe, John Stuart
Mill's classic paeon to individual liberty came at a time when,
in the words of his latest biographer, "The era of the beehive
state was dawning, and the freedom of the individual was
going out of fashion." 3 According to Mill, the threat to indi-
vidualist liberalism and democracy was coming "not, as Marx
was to insist, by economic forces which made it illusory, but
by mass opinion and bureaucracy."

In the United States, the years following the Civil War
were characterized by a tremendous economic surge that swept
away the last frontiers of the Far West and carried American
industry to levels of production surpassing all the rest of the
world. In the course of this expansion, individuality in its
crudest forms was at first strengthened. The Indian fighters,
gold miners, cowboys, and frontier desperadoes were certainly
individualists, often callous to the point of violence in ignor-
ing the rights of their fellow men. In similar fashion, the so-
called robber barons were ruthless and rugged individualists
who carried out business consolidations which eliminated the
competition of rivals.

But this individualism of exploitation and consolidation was
not in harmony with the older philosophy of natural rights and
limited government. No matter how much the farmer or manu-
facturer talked of hissez faire, in practice each sought the pro-
tection of a paternalistic government that offered direct sub-

2 Ibid., II, 114, 290, 295, 319.

3 Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York: Macmil-
lan, 1954), p. 403.

Individuality in American History 211

sidies in the form of tariffs and land grants. More significant
still, the swift exploitation of the West and the rapid growth
of American industry and population, though piling up stores
of material goods, also hastened the advent of the mass man
and society of the twentieth century. The immigrant popula-
tion coming to America from Europe easily succumbed to con-
trol by public opinion, and by the political bureaucracy.

Although most Americans, caught up in the mounting en-
thusiasm for civil service reform, were inclined to dismiss what
E. L. Godkin in 1882, called "The Danger of an Office-Holding
Aristocracy," the United States like Europe was moving in
that direction. Max Weber, who later was to compose a classic
study of bureaucracy, was stimulated in his thinking by a visit
to the United States in 1904. Here Weber perceived the para-
dox of the democracy of the country expressed in the bureau-
cratic machines which dominated political parties as well as
municipal, state, and federal governments. Weber identified
bureaucracy with rationality and rationality, in turn, with
mechanization, depersonalization, and routinization— all of
which were at odds with personal freedom and with democracy
in an individualist sense. Whether in Germany, Russia, or the
United States, Weber believed the outlook for individualist
democracy was dark.

. . . Everywhere the house is ready-made for a new servitude.
It only waits for the tempo of technical economic "progress"
to slow down and for rent to triumph over profit. The latter
victory, joined with the exhaustion of the remaining free soil
and free market, will make the masses "docile." 4

The United States was not a complete bureaucracy when
Weber wrote at the turn of the century, but it was tending in
that direction, developing the power of the bureaucracy by
permanence and pensions, by the arrogance of the expert vis-a-

4 H. M. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology
(New York: Oxford, 1946), pp. 17-18, 49-50, 71-72.

212 Essays on Individuality

vis legislatures and elected officials, and by the vogue of spe-
cialized or jargonized knowledge tested through examinations.
In the early twentieth century, the individual was approaching
anonymity, squeezed between the closing frontier and the ex-
panding powers of the political state and a machine society.

Although some mourned the loss of liberties which they
associated with an older, frontier, agrarian tradition, neverthe-
less the impact of war reinforced the anti-individualistic effects
of an industrial society. World War I, verging upon the later
climax of total war, immensely stimulated the role of the gov-
ernment as against the individual citizen. The government
regulation demanded by "progressives" in the 1900's, as a part
of a program of reform, was achieved after 1917 in connection
with a war economy. Regulation in the sense of trying to re-
store a competitive individualism now frankly yielded to regu-
lation to achieve economic integration and greater industrial
efficiency. The war made partners of government and business,
and the individual caught up in the rising tide of nationalism
and patriotism could offer only feeble protest.

War, as it was carried on in the years from 1914 to 1918,
was a compulsory business from beginning to end. Herbert
Spencer's old distinction between a military and an industrial
society vanished in the prosecution of modern total war, and
the individual, whether at home or in the army, lost his indi-
viduality to the dictates of the state.

All the activities of society are linked together as fast as
possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive
or a military defense, and the State becomes what in peace
times it has vainly struggled to become— the inexorable ar-
biter and determinant of men's businesses and attitudes and
opinions. The slack is taken up, the crosscurrents fade out,
and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever
accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end, to-
wards that "peacefulness of being at war . . ."

Individuality in American History 213

To Randolph Bourne, writing the above in his Untimely
Papers (1919), war was the health of the state. But, while it
emphasized mass conformity and the herd instinct, Bourne
sorrowfully saw that it also gave classes and individuals a lift
from the ordinary routine of life, in which they were able to
approximate to themselves the ideals of the State and the vir-
tues of the whole:

At war, the individual becomes almost identical with his
society. He achieves a superb self-assurance, an intuition of
the Tightness of all his ideas and emotions, so that in the sup-
pression of opponents or heretics he is invincibly strong; he
feels behind him all the power of the collective community.

Evincing a mild surprise at the docility of his fellow Ameri-
cans, Henry Adams described their wartime temper. "As far
as I know," he wrote to Charles M. Gaskell in June 1917, "we
have behaved like lambs and done everything we were told to
do. Never could I have conceived that in a short three months
we could have gone into a great war and adopted a conscription
not unworthy of Germany, at the bidding of a President who
was elected only a few months ago on the express ground that
he had kept us at peace." Liberals, carried away in the intensity
of waging war, or seduced by the charm of being "big shots"
in Washington, or later at Versailles, were helping to prepare
the way for the disillusionment that followed the Armistice.

The postwar revolt of the 'twenties reflected the frustration
of the individual beset by the pressures of a business civiliza-
tion and a paternalistic state. Although wartime government
regulation of economic life was partially relaxed, demobiliza-
tion in the sense of intellectual freedom was hardly achieved.
The private lives of individuals were subjected as never before
to state interference. Prohibition was only the most obvious
of the censorious laws that regimented individual customs and
morals, and even the books the individual might read or the

214 Essays on Individuality

moving pictures he might see. Individualism, carried to the
point of any radical criticism of postwar society, was suppressed
in a wave of conservative reaction. Meanwhile, there were new
dangers in the growing national tendency to equate democracy
with majority will and with equality in the material comforts
supplied by technology. Pressures to conform and keep up a
higher standard of living were impairing the psychological
balance and level of quality and competence of man as an
individual.

At the height of the prosperity of the 1920's, discerning crit-
ics questioned its cost in terms of human values. James Trus-
low Adams condemned the materialism and standardization
of Our Business Civilization. Prosperity, he wrote, entailed too
high a price in goods and services. The resulting clamor and
competition for piling up material things was harmful to intel-
lectual life and ethical values. In still more critical fashion,
Ralph Borsodi indicted the .'twenties as "ugly." The idea that
man's welfare or comfort was dependent on an unending in-
crease in production was destroying the resources of the earth
and the time man would have to enjoy them. The factory sys-
tem, he argued, would drive industrialized nations to socializa-
tion of production and consumption, and at the same time
destroy individuality in the quest for a mass-minded equality
and conformity.

These attacks on industrialism, at the very climax of its
seeming success in the 'twenties, were indications that material
prosperity had somehow failed to satisfy basic human and
individual needs. Borsodi's plea for decentralization was in line
with the wishes of others for a new humanism, or for a return
to Jeffersonian agrarian principles. This last desire was empha-
sized in 1930 in a celebrated manifesto signed by twelve promi-
nent Southern writers and teachers who indicted industrialism
for its effect on man and the arts. Increased production, they

Individuality in American History 215

asserted, led only to a useless consumption and a leisure devoid
of happiness or meaning.5

Skeptical of much of this traditional individualism because
it was so often a very limited affair, confined to an aristocracy
of upper and middle classes, John Dewey in 1930, published
his Individualism Old and New.

Dewey was not unmindful of, nor enthusiastic about, the
way in which American civilization had come to emphasize
mass production and mass consumption. Under the pressures
of advertising, buying became a duty while the older virtue of
thrift was relegated to an age of individualism. In discussing
the plight of the "lost Individual," Dewey pointed out that
the loyalties which once gave the individual focus and direction
had disappeared. The individual in consequence was bewil-
dered, and rendered still more insecure, by the mounting spec-
ter of technological unemployment. Opposed to the rise of
totalitarian nationalisms, but hopeful that individualism could
somehow be recreated in a public or democratic socialism that
would not enhance the illiberal pressure of statism, Dewey con-
cluded that "The solution of the crisis in culture is identical
with the recovery of composed, effective, and creative indi-
viduality."

Dewey's argument for a "new" individualism found a ready
response in the years immediately following. Impelled by the
depression to re-examine the state of civilization and society,
writers and politicians placed the older American individual-
ism under heavy attack. The human misery caused by hard
times obviously required large measures of social cooperation
and mutual aid. Private and local facilities seemed hopelessly in-
adequate to meet the emergency, and the consequent growing
dependence on government intervention afforded still further
basis for the denunciation of individualism.

5 John Crow Ransom, et ah, I'll Take My Stand (New York: Harper, 1930),
Introduction.

216 Essays on Individuality

That the economic crisis was in many ways a result of un-
bridled nationalism and industrialism was forgotten in the
rush toward a new political and economic collectivism. Tying
American individualism to the pioneer ways of an older fron-
tier civilization, Dean Guy Stanton Ford of the University of
Minnesota saw such a society outmoded by science and in-
vention, by the factory and the city. "The result of science 19
to illustrate, emphasize, and increase the interdependence of
men and nations. . . . Science is not interested in individuals.
... If our democratic craft is water-logged with the individual-
ism, localism, and the Jaissez faire suitable to that bygone day
will it reach port in safety?" Dean Ford asked.6

Alfred North Whitehead, the distinguished philosopher, in
his Adventures of Ideas related modern big-business industrial-
ism to feudalism by virtue of its interlocking nature. Individ-
ualists and socialists debated over what were merely details,
while "The self-sufficing independent man, with his peculiar
property which concerns no one else, is a concept without any
validity for modem civilization."

In the chaos and suffering of the depression, concern over
the fate of the free individual was submerged in the bitterness
of the masses. The very number of individuals affected by the
economic crisis deprived them of consideration as individuals.
In the past, freedom had meant individual liberty and respect
for minority rights; now the new freedom preached in Europe
and America was the right of the desperate majority against
the individual. Herbert Hoover's assertion that the funda-
mental issue facing the American people was the world-wide
attack on individual liberty was dismissed as a reactionary view.
In its haste to control the forces unloosed by total war and
modern technology, Hoover believed that mankind stood
ready to sacrifice both the intellectual and the economic free-

6 Guy Stanton Ford, Science and Civilization (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1933), pp. 14, 23.

Individuality in American History 217

doms on which political liberty is based. Though agreeing with
Hoover's strictures upon the New Deal, Supreme Court Jus-
tice Harlan Fiske Stone felt that the depression and the com-
plexity of modern industrial society prevented any return to
individualism in its more traditional meaning. He therefore
urged the former President not to publish his criticism.7

Throughout the civilized world, under the impact of the
depression, there was a headlong flight from the concept of
freedom. The so-called "revolt of the masses" was actually
more a tragic popular affirmation of willingness to accept the
"security" allegedly offered by variant forms of state socialism.
In Europe, the despair of the masses, rather than their revolt,
was the key to an understanding of fascism. In the United
States, where it was still possible to avoid the worse excesses
of statism, the New Deal nevertheless placed its major em-
phasis upon a type of liberty that minimized individual free-
dom in favor of a greater social security and economic equality
of the whole. "Talk of liberty in reform circles now was likely
to produce a yawn, if not a scowl; opportunity, at least oppor-
tunity for the millions to have jobs, was the point." 8

Collectivism of one sort or another was more widespread
than ever before in modern history, but though the collective
life had indeed arrived, "and with it a concentration of au-
thority that was impossible in the heyday of individualism,"
this authority still had to be exercised by individuals, whether
as dictators, demagogues, or democratic statesmen. Instead of
suppressing the predatory individual, the collective national
state might, in the words of Barbara S. Morgan, "merely shift
his main activities to the political field and place more destinies
in his hands." Despite the popular dismissal of rugged indi-
vidualism as productive of "ragged individualizes," a scatter-

7 Hoover-Stone correspondence, cited in A. T. Mason, Security through Free-
dom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), pp. 74ff.

8 Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 329.

2i 8 Essays on Individuality

ing of thoughtful liberals pointed out during the 'thirties that,
however perverted by selfishness, the ideal of individualism was
basically sound. "At the bottom, it asserts that the human in-
dividual is all that really counts." 9

During the depression years, it was difficult for individualists
to refute the view that collectivism was inevitable. The grow-
ing conviction that individuality was an illusion, or at best an
anachronism, and that the world would have to develop col-
lectively, had a kind of mushroom or snowball effect which
was to the immense advantage of collectivism. Everywhere the
emphasis was on a shared misery, or an enforced equality,
which it was hoped would, in time, lead to a new era of plenty.
The maldistribution of wealth under competitive capitalism
was blamed for the failure of consumption to keep pace with
the productive capacity of modern industry. Economic equal-
ity, if it encouraged increased consumption, would be a boon
to both reformers and manufacturers.

While the totalitarian state deliberately educated its people
to want certain things, in the United States consumer demand
was encouraged by advertising and pricing. When the planned
and managed economy still failed to produce the desired re-
sult of recovery from the depression, the world turned to the
artificially induced prosperity of an armaments economy. In
the long run this meant war. More immediately, it necessi-
tated economic mobilization with allocation of consumer
goods and industrial production. Since armaments were quickly
self-destructive, either by use or obsolescence, full production
and employment were achieved in a kind of "bootstrap" oper-
ation. The collectivists' assault on individuality was thus based
ultimately on the need to go to war. How paradoxical and
tragic that the good society or supposed Utopia of collectivism,
designed to gain a better life for individuals in the mass,

9T. V. Smith, The Promise of American Politics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1936), p. 15.

Individuality in American History 219

should be able to do this only by resorting to war or a war
economy! Peoples ready to sacrifice freedom for security
seemed also willing to give up life itself.

The conclusion of the Second World War marked no break
in the forces arrayed against individuality. The first of these
was militarism, with its implicit respect for authority and its
inevitable subordination of the individual personality. In con-
trast to all previous postwar periods, the end of World War II
witnessed no effective demobilization of arms or men. Peace-
time conscription is in obvious conflict with the personal free-
dom of the drafted individual. Secondly, victory over the Axis
powers did little to diminish fears of the growth of govern-
mental power or the danger of dictatorship in the world. At the
same time, paralleling the expansion of the political state were
the ever-increasing economic powers concentrated in the mod-
ern corporation.

In the new industrial society, the corporation was almost an
entity in itself— the only institution in modern times virtually
independent of the state as well as of its own stockholders.
Managers and workers alike are largely divorced from their
product and, as Peter Drucker has noted, it is the organization,
rather than the individual, which is productive.10 The old idea
that the state's functions are political rather than industrial,
with the accompanying duty to prevent monopoly, was ren-
dered obsolete as a government-big business economy suc-
ceeded the notion of trustbusting. Finally, and most serious
of all for the individual, was the continued sway of national-
ism, carried in the decade of the cold war to the extreme of a
kind of multilateral nationalism in which the world divided,
under American and Russian leadership, into two rival blocs.
This new so-called internationalism was actually a form of
interventionism in which competing super-nationalisms ex-
panded and projected themselves onto a world scale.

10 Peter F. Drucker, The New Society (New York: Harper, 1950), p. 6.

220 Essays on Individuality

In a world so badly divided, individual insecurity was height-
ened by the prospect that the atomic weapons of another
world war must, in the words of an outstanding scientist, "in-
crease the entropy of this planet, until all distinctions of hot
or cold, good and bad, man and matter have vanished in the
formation of the white furnace of a new star." u With the
era of the cold war, national security was in danger of being
achieved only at the price of individual freedom. Analyzing
the threat inherent in the garrison-police state, Harold Lass-
well rephrased Tocqueville to say that "Expanded government
can be expected to be more centralized government." The cen-
tralizing process led to educational and scientific activities be-
coming more dependent on government, while at the same
time the state withheld information, and the press, public
opinion, political parties, Congress, courts, and most civilian
agencies, all declined in relative if not positive importance.

Contributing effectively to the nationalistic propaganda of
cold war was the growing might and power of the mass media.
Radio, moving pictures, newspapers and magazines with na-
tional circulations, all catered to the mass market in which a
premium was placed on uniformity of opinion and standardi-
zation of taste. While a few writers achieved a numerous
clientele, a greater number were left without readers. Even
more alarming was the fact that those writers who appealed
successfully to a mass market often did so only by satisfying
the official or popular view. The mass media, as distinct from
the disappearing daily newspaper ruled by a country editor,
were thus discouraging to individual artistic and literary
achievement.

In the era of postwar prosperity, though there was no lack
of personal insecurity or frustration, this uniformity was often
condoned by the supposedly consoling argument that the

11 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1950), p. 142.

Individuality in American History 221

American people had never before enjoyed such material
abundance or so high a standard of living. Largely neglected
was the antithetical point of view that the. people might have
to pay for this prosperity "by finding themselves in a central-
ized and bureaucratized society and world shrunken and agi-
tated by the contact— accelerated by industrialism— of races,
nations, and cultures." 12

From almost any angle of vision or historical perspective, it
is difficult to anticipate that the second half of the twentieth
century will reverse the long-standing movement toward col-
lectivism and away from individualism. But, at least, the im-
portance of the problem is being recognized, and in contrast
to the former acceptance of the inevitability and desirability
of some form of collectivism, a growing body of thought is
concerning itself with the preservation of individuality in a
free society.

There is perhaps one small, added ray of hope— the encour-
agement offered by the perversity of the human personality,
and the chance that man may still struggle, even against over-
whelming odds, to preserve his threatened individual integrity.

12 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1950), p. 18.

As a Man Thinketh

by Joseph Wood Krutch

A CONSIDERATION OF INDIVIDUALITY POSES MANY QUESTIONS,

three of which I should like to examine. They are: ( 1 ) Is the
term as commonly used meaningful? (2) If so, then is Indi-
viduality to be regarded as a desirable characteristic? ( 3 ) Does
the present condition of man promote or discourage it?

The first of these questions has been asked persistently dur-
ing the past century and the answer implied or stated has
very often been in the negative. One cannot be an individual
in the traditional sense unless his individuality is a character-
istic of some persona or ego which persists as some sort of
unity having a continuous history. All intimate experience?
conveys the impression that one is such a persisting unity—
we feel that "I" has always been "I"— and most western ethical,
religious, and philosophical systems have been based upon the
assumption that such a continuous ego is a primary reality.

Of course this assumption was questioned as long ago as the
time of Heraclitus, who insisted that flux, not a persistence of
identity, was the characteristic of all things including the so-
called individual. Upon this was founded the Greek pleasantry,
about the malefactor who argued that since he was not the
man he had been yesterday, he could not reasonably be pun-
ished for anything he had done then. But it is principally in
recent times that the paradox has been widely accepted as
simple fact and the doctrine that, for one reason or another,

222

As a Man Thinketh 223

no man is responsible, has been made the basis of legal re-
forms.

Thejnpdern campaign against belief in the individual, the
persona, or the ego as a reality of primary importance^has been
conducted along at least three fronts.

Something closely related to the Heraclitian paradox has
been generally recognized in connection with literature, where
what has been called 'The Dissolution of the Ego'is a recog-
nized process. Luigi Pirandello and Marcel Proust come first
to mind— Pirandello with his reiterated insistence that nojnaj}
has a "reai-character/'^s distinguished either from the various
characteristics which' at various times he exhibits^ or from the
idea of that character, as different acquaintances formulate it
for themselves; Proust with his no less frequently repeated in-
sistence that people change so^from day to day that unless one
sees them continuously^they become quite unrecognizable.

The position taken by Pirandello and Proust (and more or
less clearly suggested in much modern literature) goes far be-
yond the mere recognition that men are often inconsistent.
This we all admit. But it does not mean anything to say that
a man is inconsistent unless we assume that there is some-
thing consistent from which he is temporarily inconsistent.
We may say that it is "unlike him" to do this or that. We may
solemnly adjure him to "be true to himself" or we may flip-
pantly enjoin him: "Be yourself!" But the recognition of an in-
consistency implies a prior and more significant consistency.
You cannot be true to yourself unless you have a self. It is
just this prior assumption which the dissolvers of the ego deny.

The Christian and the classic conception of the ego seems
to have been of a fully conscious unity; of a soul-captain born
with us at birth and perhaps created by God. It is an ultimate,
even the ultimate, reality persisting through time. It may im-
prove itself or it may corrupt itself but it can never cease to
be itself. Psychology, on the other hand, has eroded this ego

224 Essays on Individuality

away and lent support to its final dissolution as proclaimed in
Pirandello and Proust. In the first place, psychology insists that
the ego is like an iceberg inasmuch as not more than a fraction
is above the surface of the consciousness. In the second place,
many psychologists assert that what does occur within the area
of consciousness is not direction by an integrated "I" but is
the result of a constantly shifting reaction between instinct
on the one hand and stimuli and traumas on the other; so
that the ego of any moment is simply the temporary result of
heredity plus past and present experiences. Individuality be-
comes, then, no more than the momentary result of the forces
which have played upon the so-called individual.

The second front, of the war against the concept of the
reality and importance of individuality, here merges with the
first. Both Heraclitian flux and* the psychology of the uncon-
scious imply that what seems at any moment to be an ego is
actually merely an instant in a process. Therefore, since proc-
esses are the result of causes, the character of an ego at any
moment is the necessary result of external causes operating
upon it, never either what it chooses to be or even the in-
evitable result of what it was in the beginning. It is instead,
and like everything else in the universe, inevitably what the
forces acting upon it have made it. The Will which the ego
seems to exercise is, like all the conscious phenomena associ-
ated with it, illusory. As Schopenhauer said, we can do what
we will but we cannot will what we will will. Everything is
determined by something else and we exist in what William
James called "a block universe." There are no unmoved mov-
ers—which is what the doctrine of free will supposes each
persona to be.

The man in the street would, perhaps, reject— if he had ever
faced— this proposition in its absolute form. Nevertheless he
assumes it to be, in general, true. "Society" is responsible for
whatever vices or virtues any man exhibits or, as Paul Lukas,

As a Man Thinketh 225

the Director of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, has
stated very succinctly and absolutely: "In today's thinking,
antisocial behavior is considered to be the product of unique
economic, sociological, and psychological factors in each of-
fender's past history."

This leaves no room for a captain-of-the-soul or for any re-
sponsible ego. Behaviorism as a rigid dogma certainly has
fewer adherents than it once did. Nevertheless, it has left so
deep a mark upon sociology as well as upon psychology that
many, perhaps most, present-day sociologists and psychologists
consider human behavior and its determinants the only fruit-
ful subject of study.

The third line of attack follows logically from the other
two. The most obvious characteristic of the classical ego is its
consciousness. But the significance of consciousness was de-
nied three-quarters of a century ago by Thomas Henry Huxley,
who called it merely an "epiphenomenon." The more modern
form of this position is expressed in the statement that we do
not act because we are conscious but are conscious because
we act. The sense of having willed is, for example, simply
something which accompanies the choice which external in-
fluences have made inevitable.

At any given moment, of course, one man may still differ
from another even though he has no continuous personality,
is purely the product of forces, and is conscious only because
of a shadowy epiphenomenon. To that extent men are still in-
dividuals. But I am assuming that in the present consideration
individuality of this limited and determined kind is not what
we are discussing. I assume further that such individuality as
we are discussing cannot exist except as an aspect of personality
and that the existence of personality implies the existence of
some vestige of the classical ego surviving the destructive criti-

226 Essays on Individuality

cism of Heraclitus, Huxley, and J. B. Watson— to take three
convenient names.

I suggest further that such an ego can have little significance
unless four powers, limited but real, are attributed to it. ( 1 )
Such an ego must be conscious and its consciousness must be
a primary reality not an epiphenomenon which is merely a
by-product of action. (2) That ego must also be capable of
thought, which is to say it must be sometimes capable of rea-
son as distinguished from mere rationalization, which is all
that some philosophies grant it. (In other words, Aristotle's
statement that Man is a reasoning animal must be accepted if
it is taken to mean, not an animal who always reasons but an
animal who is capable of reasoning. ) ( 3 ) To some extent, at
least, such an ego must be capable also of making a choice not
determined by anything outside itself, or in other words must
possess some freedom of will; not be exclusively a conditioned
machine. (4) Finally, and this is perhaps the most important
as well as the most controversial of all, that ego must be
capable of making "value judgments" which are not merely
the rationalization of the prejudices into which it has been
conditioned.

Modern criticism has certainly demonstrated that the ego
does not exercise these presumed capacities as frequently as
was once assumed. Probably the unconsciousness influences it
at least as often as the consciousness. Certainly we often obey
our conditioning when we think we are making free choices;
often rationalize when we think we are reasoning; and often
exhibit prejudices when we think we are making value judg-
ments. But it is hardly demonstrable that we never reason,
choose, or judge. And there is perhaps no speculative question
more important at the present moment than the question
whether or not man actually is "nothing but" a conditioned
and rationalizing automaton which has somehow or other
generated the epiphenomenon called consciousness.

As a Man Thinketh 227

There is, I think, a stronger current of protest against the
negative answer to that question, even in the ranks of psychol-
ogists, than there was a generation ago. Professor Gordon All-
port's "Terry Lectures," published under the title Becoming,
is a notable discussion which includes some estimate of this
trend. On the other hand, some experimenters with "electronic
brains" seem convinced that they will ultimately be able to
construct a machine exhibiting in at least elementary form all
such mental powers as memory, choice, and learning. For
these reasons, it seems to me that one of the most fruitful dis-
cussions upon which individualists might embark would be
just a discussion of the present state of knowledge as it relates
to the question whether or not man does give evidence of
having a personality in the sense in which I have used the
term.

I am not myself capable of giving such an adequate review
of the present state of knowledge and opinion. At best, how-
ever, the evidence which science can present upon either side
falls short of being perfectly conclusive. Therefore, we must
act on the assumption that one answer or the other is correct.
And this is a case where the answer we do assume has incal-
culable consequences for society, not only for our attitude to-
ward ourselves, but indeed for the whole experience of living.
The question: "Are we men or machines?" is perhaps the most
fateful we can ask and one to which we must, in practice, give
some answer.

One of America's leading professors of experimental psy-
chology has already proposed that, since man's susceptibility
to conditioning has been demonstrated and since his freedom
of choice cannot be demonstrated, then education should
frankly concern itself, not with the training of either reason or
moral judgment, but with the conditioning of its subjects.
Surely few questions could be more fateful than this: "Shall

228 Essays on Individuality

we abandon the attempt to train men to think and treat them
merely as creatures whose behavior patterns can be set?" Yet
that question is only a single illustration of what is at stake.

From what has already been said it is evident that I myself
give the pragmatic answer: "We are men." I should, however,
like to defend that answer, not by presenting scientific evi-
dence nor by proposing merely the Jamesian formula, but by
an argument which rests upon an analogy with certain now
generally recognized procedures in a physical science.

Until quite recently most sciences have assumed that a hy-
pothesis is either true or false and that between two contra-
dictory hypotheses the scientist must, at a minimum, adopt
one or the other as a working principle. Recently the physicists
have frankly rejected this assumption. The ultimate nature of
reality, as some have said, is unknown and possibly both un-
thinkable and unknowable as well. For certain purposes it is
necessary to assume one hypothesis, for other purposes an-
other. The classic example of this dilemma is presented by the
phenomena associated with light, which must at times be
considered as an undulation, at other times as a corpuscular
stream. Perhaps both hypotheses are, in some way which we
cannot conceive, "true."

Now it may possibly be that in some analogous fashion the
ego is both free and also what its conditioning has made it.
After all, the reconciliation of Fate and Free Will has baffled
mankind since the problem was first undertaken. To most
people it has seemed impossible to conceive how man could
be either free or not free. And the argument between the
mechanists and determinists on the one side and the defenders
of man as a reasoning, choosing animal on the other, is only
one version of this general debate. But too many psychologists
and sociologists have, it seems to me, refused to accept the
adjustment which so many physicists have now come to.

As a Man Thinketh 229

We have, say many psychologists, evidence that man can be
conditioned, no evidence that he can be free. You must either
accept our hypothesis that men cannot be free, or you must
turn your back, not only upon our evidence, but also upon
everything we have learned about how improving the eco-
nomic condition of a group, for example, may do more than
moral suasion to reduce crime. In other words, they are trying
to force upon us a choice which the physicist refuses to make.
They are saying that man cannot be in some sense responsible
and in some sense not responsible for what he does and is.

Perhaps the time will come when psychology will have
demonstrated exactly to what extent and just how an "ego,"
as I originally defined it, does exist. Perhaps it will some day
produce an ethical system and an aesthetic system which will
reduce both to scientific laws dependent upon the psychology
of the human brain. But it has not yet done either and to refuse
to discuss ethics or aesthetics in any except scientific terms
simply compels us to deal very inadequately with both. It does
violence also to all our direct experience and dismisses as
irrelevant all the intimate experiences of living in favor of an
interpretation which even the most convinced must admit
does not correspond to his sense of immediate reality.

The most dogmatic determinist and mechanist ponders his
problems and makes what even he calls "a decision." If this is
not to become a world in which all men are treated as auto-
mata, and in which even the individual comes to reject as un-
real every intellectual or emotional process in which he finds
himself involved, it may be necessary to emulate the boldness
of the physicists and say simply: "If I can't reconcile the evi-
dence of psychology and sociology with my own experience,
then I will fall back upon paradox. It is sometimes convenient,
useful, and even necessary to regard man as a conditioned ma-
chine; at other times it is a violation of fundamental human
nature not to regard him otherwise."

230 Essays on Individuality

In this connection it seems illuminating to quote J. Robert
Oppenheimer (Science and the Common Understanding,
Simon and Schuster, 1954):

It seems rather unlikely that we shall be able to describe in
physico-chemical terms the physiological phenomena which
accompany conscious thought, or sentiment, or will. . . . [But]
should an understanding of the physical correlates of con-
sciousness indeed be available, it will not itself be the appro-
priate description for the thinking man himself, for the
clarification of his thoughts, the resolution of his will, or the
delight of his eye and mind at works of beauty.

Speaking specifically of value judgments, or what he calls
"the age old problem of good and evil," Professor Conant
(Modern Science and Modern Man, Columbia University
Press, 1952) said:

As to the unifying, materialistic World Hypothesis, my
doubt stems from its manifest inadequacy. . . . On the other
hand, the formulations that attempt to include spiritual values,
modern physics, biology and cosmology within one total
scheme attempt, to my mind, too much. . . . My preference
would be for more adequate exploration of special limited
areas of experience; one of these would include those experi-
ences which can be ordered in terms of a system of spiritual
values.

To attempt to describe and evaluate individuality entirely in
terms of experimentally determinable data is to attempt to
foist upon us what Oppenheimer calls "not . . . the appropriate
description for the thinking man himself." To try to deal with
the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual aspects of the individual
in similar terms is to reject what Conant calls "more adequate
exploration of special limited areas of experience" and his
contention that such limited areas of experience must be or-
dered in terms appropriate to them. It is certainly untrue now

As a Man Thinketh 231

(and I believe it always will be untrue) that reason, will, and,
value judgment can be explored or ordered adequately if we
use only terms appropriate to physics, chemistry, sociology or
even experimental psychology.

To take the simplest and mildest possible example, it is, I
think, stultifying to attempt (as has so often been done) to
substitute for "Virtue" or "Goodness" some such term as
"socially useful." Goodness may be socially useful but it is
also more than merely that, and the more must not be dis-
regarded. Goodness cannot be an attribute of anything except
a persona; social utility may be an attribute of a machine. And
here I would like to add, by way of parenthesis, that the indis-
pensable importance of what are commonly called humanistic
studies and approaches is just that art does explore the experi-
ences with which it deals in terms appropriate to them.

So much, then, for the question of whether the term "indi-
viduality," as commonly used, is meaningful. My second ques-
tion was: Is individuality as here defined to be regarded as
desirable? My own answer to that question is obviously, Yes.

Perhaps few would answer it definitely "No." But it seems
to me obvious that much less value is put upon individuality
now than formerly. It can, I think, hardly be questioned that
educators and sociologist put less stress than they once did on
"the development of individuality" and more on "adjustment"
—which may not be incompatible with individuality but cer-
tainly points in a different direction. Neither can it be ques-
tioned that "normality" has become a key word and that the
tendency is to make little if any distinction between "normal"
and "average," so that the ideal becomes approximation to a
common denominator. Elementary teachers stress activities
and interests "appropriate to the age group." A society of
"normal well-adjusted citizens" seems to mean one in which
individuals are as nearly as possible characterized by the same

232 Essays on Individuality

opinions and tastes in intellectual and artistic as well as in
purely physical matters.

There remains my third question: Does the present condi-
tion of man promote or discourage individuality? I must an-
swer that, despite the currently increasing protest against the
disparagement of individuality, it is the opinion of many, in-
cluding myself, that men are tending to become less and less
individual. This might well be expected in an atmosphere
created by the stress on "normality" and "adjustment" and by
the tendency to minimize the importance and even the reality
of will, choice, and consciousness. Moreover, many of the
specific institutions of our society tend to encourage the growth
of conformity. And the influence of society is not denied by
even the most passionate defenders of the theory that an in-
dividual man is something more than merely the product of
social forces.

All forms of mass communication and mass entertainment
inevitably tend to submit a larger and larger proportion of
the population to precisely the same intellectual and artistic
experiences. Large-scale industry and the efficiency of mass
production make it more and more profitable to cater exclu-
sively to the lowest common denominator in all things. An
increasingly dense population increases the closeness of con-
tact between individuals so that it becomes more and more
difficult, physically as well as psychically, to lead any life which
does not conform to a prevailing pattern. And since mass in-
dustry must cater to mass tastes, advertising uses every pos-
sible device to encourage the feeling that one should be
ashamed not to want and to get what his neighbor has.

In the arts, stress on the best seller and the Hit Parade tends
to create the impression that the most widely accepted art is
necessarily the best. Education, instead of countering by em-
phasizing the excellent rather than the "normal," encourages

As a Man Thinketh 233

the general tendency. The large state universities emphasize
"preparation for life" rather than "learning" and preparation
for life is likely to mean merely vocational training— which is
again "adjustment to the existing pattern" in all things. More-
over, the student who enters college has been prepared for this
acculturation since kindergarten where "group activity" pre-
vails and, so I have at least been told, the hobby horse is
sometimes officially frowned upon on the ground that it en-
courages the young rider to gallop away by himself.

Somewhat less obvious is the fact that the individual worker,
either manual or intellectual, is less and less favorably placed
by comparison with the member of a team. This is plain
enough in the case of "the worker" whose union will be strong
in proportion to the number of members who perform the
same tasks and have identical interests.

But even the college professor who is a member of com-
mittees making group studies, or engaged in some other co-
operative academic enterprise, is the more likely to benefit
from subsidies and grants as well as to seem most important
to administrators. And perhaps the least obvious but a not
unimportant fact is this: Only the worker whose function is
essentially that of a robot can enjoy fully the benefits of the
increasingly short work week. No man whose individual per-
sonality or talent is essential in his job can function in an
organization based upon successive "shifts." Neither the execu-
tive, the research scientist, nor, indeed, anyone in any sense
creative can drop his work at the end of seven or six hours
and have another step into his place. Leisure thus becomes
increasingly the special privilege of the robot, and men are
encouraged to become robots by the simple fact that "they
don't have to work so hard."

Is it any wonder that such an array of forces, ranging all the
way from metaphysical convictions to managerial details,
should have created the phenomenon called by those who dis-

234 Essays on Individuality

like it the Mass Man and by those who approve, "the normal,
well-adjusted, common man?"

Whatever we call him, certain of his characteristics are
recognized both by his admirers and his detractors. For in-
stance: He believes that he is living at the most fortunate
period of history and looks with pitying contempt upon all
the predecessors who were compelled to live in a less "pro-
gressive" time. He enthusiastically buys all the newest gadgets,
believes that "a high standard of living" is the summum
bonum and raises a family larger than was common a genera-
tion ago.

He attends the most successful movies, buys records of the
biggest song hits and, if he occasionally reads a book, chooses
a best seller. His opinions, tastes, and preferences are near
those which polls and questionnaires show to be "normal";
and, superficially at least, he seems well content with his lot-
whatever some may say of his inner tensions and incipient
neuroses. For himself and his family he wants "all the ad-
vantages" and believes that he is getting them. That every-
thing from the furniture of his living room to the furniture
of his mind is nearly indistinguishable from that of everyone
he knows, does not disturb him. He believes what the adver-
tisers have told him, namely, that standard brands are best.
Any dissatisfaction with any feature of his life which he may
begin to feel, and any nonconformity which he may be tempted
to indulge, is repressed as a sign of some failure of integration
and adjustment.

The lack in such a man is simply this: He has no face. The
fact that he not only exists but functions successfully in the
struggle for survival is the most convincing argument on the
side of those who contend that man is nothing but the product
of social forces and that he can be made to accept as right,
proper, good and desirable whatever his society approves. This
is the mass man whom the experimental psychologist and the

As a Man Thinketh 235

"social engineer" can make. He is also, presumably, the man
of the future unless it is true that human nature is something
in itself, that man is capable of rebelling and of resisting con-
ditioning. All recent experience indicates that he is more
plastic, less capable of choice and of will than was formerly
supposed. The undetermined question is whether or not he is
limitlessly plastic and nothing but conditionabh.

Many critics of communism have argued that its funda-
mental appeal is the release it gives from responsibility and
that this release from the necessity of forming opinions, de-
termining actions, or cultivating tastes appeals very strongly
to at least the majority of men. Recently Paul Tillich pub-
lished The Courage to Be, a book which propounds the more
general thesis that the ego or persona is a form of Being in the
technical metaphysical sense. If we accept that concept, then
the desire to accept a totalitarian authority is simply an obvi-
ous outward manifestation of the failure of the "courage to
be" and a desire to relapse into that state of non-being which
is the actual nature of man as mechanistic determinists de-
scribe him. One may then say that the mass-man is well on
the way to becoming the non-man.

In the presence of Samuel Johnson the remark was once
made that it is hard to understand why any man should want
to make a beast of himself by getting drunk. Johnson replied:
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being
a man." So, of course, does he who makes of himself not a
beast, but a machine.

Communism as a form of government may relieve man of
many specific responsibilities. Dialectic materialism as a phi-
losophy relieves him completely of all responsibility to ex-
hibit any "courage to be." Perhaps the sociologist, the anthro-
pologist, and the psychologist who set out to prove that indi-
viduality in any meaningful form cannot exist do so because

2 36 Essays on Individuality

they want to be a machine in order to escape the responsi-
bility (and, as Johnson said, the pain) of being men. Perhaps,
then, all the instruments of government, all the institutions of
society, and all the methods of education which have been
enumerated as tending to encourage the mass-man do not
actually create him. Perhaps they simply provide many differ-
ent opportunities and encouragements to escape the responsi-
bilities which consciousness, will, and the power to make value
judgments impose upon him.

If this is true, then it is still desirable that those who prefer
to be, and to be surrounded by others who also are, should
concern themselves with the governmental, economic, edu-
cational, and social forces which provide encouragement to
those who prefer non-being and thus require of the individual
more and more courage if he is to remain an individual, or, in
short, to continue to participate in Being. But it is perhaps
also true that the most inclusive encouragement of the failure
of individuality is simply the scientific and philosophical theory
that the characteristics commonly attributed to man as a Being
are illusory and that, since he cannot in that sense be, there is
no reason why he should make the attempt or why society
should encourage him to do so.

As a man thinketh so he is. Man is tending to become what
we have thought that he is.

Collectivism and Individualism

by William M. McGovern

THE ROLE WHICH THE INDIVIDUAL CAN AND SHOULD PLAY IN

social, economic, and political life is a problem which has long
perplexed, both the practical statesman and the abstract phi-
losopher.

In the city states of ancient Greece it was generally thought
that the individual should be subordinated to the poJis. The
idea that the private citizen had certain innate or "natural"
rights with which the poJis should not interfere was not so
much attacked as ignored. This general attitude was accepted
in some form or another by the outstanding political thinkers.
Aristotle argued that the chief function of the state was to
promote "the good life" among its citizens— by education, if
possible; by force, if necessary. The state, moreover, was to be
the sole judge of what was and was- not "the good life." Plato
went even further and theorized that the state, through its
rulers or guardians, should regulate in minute detail the moral
and economic actions, the literature, the music, and even the
thoughts of its citizens.

In the Hellenistic age, and more especially after the rise of
Rome to what was considered world supremacy, there was a
marked change in attitude. Instead of maintaining that a man
lives and moves and has his being solely as a member of a
small city state, most persons adopted, without question, the
theory which can best be called cosmopolitanism. All men, as
men, are members of the human race and this is the one unit

2 37

238 Essays on Individuality

that really counts. The Roman Stoics, and the great Roman
lawyers such as Cicero, Gaius, and Ulpian, whom they influ-
enced, applied this conception to the operation of law. Ac-
cording to the Stoics the basis of law is not found in the de-
crees of any one political unit, but rather in the jus gentium,
the ideas of just and unjust common to all ethnic groups. Jus
gentium, in turn, is necessarily based upon jus naturale, or
natural law, knowable by reason.

This cosmopolitanism promoted an incipient individualism.
If men should be governed not by the arbitrary dictates of a
city state or a tribal chief, but by general rules, then it be-
comes incumbent on the individual to understand these rules
and apply them to himself. It is more than a coincidence that
the later Roman jurisprudence, which developed the theory
of cosmopolitanism, also developed the theory of persona, or
personal and individual rights which the state must carefully
respect and protect.

The later Epicurean philosophy, which also exercised great
influence upon Rome, was based upon entirely different prin-
ciples, but it also led to a marked form of individualism. The
"highest good" was not to be found in any form of communal
life, but rather in each man seeking for himself the type of
life which gave him the greatest deep and lasting pleasure.

The barbarian invasions and the collapse of the Roman
Empire put an end to abstract discussions regarding the rela-
tive merits of collectivism and individualism. When some
semblance of order was restored, during the latter part of the
Middle Ages, there developed a very peculiar and interesting
situation, a sort of compromise between collectivism and in-
dividualism. Extreme individualism was rejected. No one
claimed that each man had the right to think, to speak, and
to act as he pleased. It was generally agreed that the individual
was of importance only through being a member of some

Collectivism and Individualism 239

group. At the same time, extreme collectivism was rejected
because the ordinary man was a member of and subject to the
rules of one or more different, competitive groups, no one
of which could secure complete power over the populace.

Extreme collectivism in the form of statism, the complete
subjection of the citizens to the state, was rendered impossible
by the fact that the power of such states as existed was sharply
limited by two types of forces, one of these international or
super-national, the other intranational or sub-national. By far
the most important of the super-national forces was the Cath-
olic church, under the leadership of the Pope. It was univer-
sally believed that the church had jurisdiction over all Chris-
tians, irrespective of the particular country in which they dwelt,
or of the particular temporal ruler to whom they owed alle-
giance. This, in turn, meant that the particular states were pro-
hibited from passing laws which might be contrary to the doc-
trines of the super-national church. Thus the particular states
could not enact laws regarding marriage and divorce or laws
regarding testaments, as all such matters were held to be under
ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

The state was thus strictly limited in its powers and its func-
tions by super-national forces. It was also subject to important
limitation by forces within the state. Medieval Europe was
strongly influenced by feudalism, and by feudal law most of
the nobles were held to have certain inherent rights and privi-
leges with which the state could not lawfully interfere. The
relations between the ruler and his vassal lords were not sub-
ject to general legislation; such matters were regulated by
private contract or agreement between the two parties. The
duties which one vassal owed to his lord, and the tribute which
he should pay, differed widely from the duties and financial
obligations of other vassals.

In like manner it became customary to grant special charters
to various cities and towns and to the various guilds and cor-

240 Essays on Individuality

porations within these municipalities. These charters bestowed
special rights and privileges upon the municipalities or cor-
porations concerned. Since the rights and privileges varied
from case to case, it was extremely difficult to pass general
legislation affecting all these subordinate bodies. Normally,
these charters could not be revoked or seriously amended with-
out the consent of all the parties concerned. This meant a
practical limitation on the authority of central government
in the interest of autonomous groups and therefore to some
extent in the interest of the individuals composing them.

In the later Middle Ages the rulers of the secular states were
also limited by the development of legislative assemblies, vari-
ously called Cortes, Etats Generaux, Parliaments, etc. These
were chosen, in one way or another, by the spiritual and tem-
poral nobility, by the land-owning gentry, and by the leading
guilds of the various municipalities. This development was of
importance not merely as a means of curbing the ambitions of
the monarch but also by introducing the idea that group in-
terests must be considered in any attempt to increase the
power of the state as a whole over its subjects.

The forces which led to the Renaissance and the Reforma-
tion swept away the social, economic, and political conditions
which had prevailed in most of Western Europe during the
Middle Ages. The medieval compromise of pluralism ceased
to influence most Europeans, and the fundamental struggle
between collectivism and individualism again came to the fore.

At first the forces favoring collectivism were strikingly suc-
cessful. During the first part of the sixteenth century the secu-
lar rulers of most states enormously increased their powers.
As these secular rulers came to be more and more identified
with the state itself, this meant that both the power and the
influence of the state were also greatly amplified.

Part of this transformation was the direct result of the

Collectivism and Individualism 241

Reformation. This nationalistic rising gave a staggering blow
to the papacy and to the super-national ecclesiastical hierarchy
which the Pope headed. In the countries which accepted Prot-
estantism the papal court no longer had any substantial juris-
piction. Canon law was rejected and ecclesiastical courts were
abolished. The secular ruler successfully claimed complete
control over all persons within his domain, irrespective of
whether they were or were not in holy orders. Much of the
vast material wealth of the church was confiscated; that which
remained was subjected to secular taxation.

The new Protestant churches, moreover, were in most cases
completely subordinated to the secular authority. In England,
Henry VIII was formally proclaimed Supreme Head of the
Anglican Church. It was the king who now decided what the
organization, the ritual, and the articles of faith were to be.
In the countries which adopted Lutheranism the situation was
not very different. Luther, to be sure, insisted that the True
Church was the Church Invisible, consisting of all sanctified
persons, whether living or dead. But he also emphasized the
need for a Visible Church, consisting of flesh and blood mem-
bers, whether sanctified or not, and he was perfectly willing to
see this Visible Church controlled by the secular authorities.
As a result, in most Lutheran countries the established church
became in effect a special branch of the temporal government.

Even in the countries which as a whole retained spiritual
allegiance to Rome, the papacy lost much of its erstwhile
power over the secular rulers. The kings of France, for example,
remained Roman Catholics, but nevertheless demanded al-
most as much freedom from ecclesiastical control as those
monarchs who had gone over to Protestantism. By virtue of a
special concordat with the Pope, King Francis I secured the
right to nominate all members of the French ecclesiastical
hierarchy. Moreover, it was agreed that no papal bulls could

242 Essays on Individuality

be promulgated in France without the consent of the French
monarch.

As the Reformation was undermining the super-national
religious check upon the new nation-states, there developed a
coincident movement which led to the weakening of those
internal forces which had likewise curbed the authority of
central government. With the rise of commerce feudalism de-
cayed and during the sixteenth century the kings of the vari-
ous countries were able to check, and even abolish, many of
the special privileges and rights which had been held by the
great feudal nobility.

At the same time, the power and the influence of the char-
tered municipalities and corporations tended to dwindle. This
is somewhat surprising as this period witnessed an enormous
growth of trade and industry, which in turn brought about a
great increase of the urban middle class. But that growth itself
weakened the restrictions imposed by the medieval charters.
Above all the merchants needed law and order, and it seemed
to them that this could best be secured by strengthening the
authority of central government.

Centralized national authority was also aided by the attri-
tion of the embryonic parliamentary institutions established
under feudalism. These had made consent of the legislative
assembly necessary for the levying of taxes upon landed prop-
erty, leaving the monarchs free to gather other taxes as they
saw fit. In most countries the royal governments levied internal
and external customs dues at will. With the growth of trade
and industry these taxes brought in an ever larger revenue,
with the result that the rulers were no longer so dependent
upon legislative grants. The kings of Spain and Portugal grew
enormously wealthy from the tribute paid to them personally
from the newly founded colonies in America and in Asia. So
it is not surprising that the legislative assemblies which had
formerly been so important began to lose their influence. The

Collectivism and Individualism 243

Coites of Spain and Portugal, and the corresponding bodies in
France and the Germanic countries were convened less and
less frequently and eventually faded out. In England, Parlia-
ment continued to assemble, but under the Tudor monarchs
it became completely subservient to the royal commands.

Unquestionably this slow but steady growth of centralized
government met with general approbation. Far from looking
with dread at the increasing powers of the central government,
the general populace welcomed the decay of the oppressive
feudal nobility and of the monopolistic corporations. This
sentiment was strengthened by the printing press and growing
urban literacy. Writers such as Belloy, Barclay, and Filmer de-
fended the "Divine Right" of an absolute ruler in an all-pow-
erful state. Today such men are largely forgotten, but in their
own time they enjoyed immense popularity. Of more lasting
influence were the writings of Jean Bodin, the great French
thinker, who glorified the powerful centralized state from a
more philosophical point of view. Most important of all were
the doctrines put forth by that outstanding English political
philosopher, Thomas Hobbes.

The basic part of Hobbes' political thought was centered
around the theory of sovereignty, an idea first enunciated by
Bodin but greatly expanded and clarified in the Hobbesian
philosophy. The theory of sovereignty falls into two parts.
First is the declaration that within every state at any given
moment a person or a group of persons in fact possesses abso-
lute power. Hobbes used this phase of the theory to argue in
favor of frankly delegating all the powers of the state to an
absolute monarch. More significant today is the second part
of the theory: That the state ought to possess sole ultimate
power over all persons and groups of persons within its terri-
tory. This eliminates any possibility of the state being curbed
by a super-national agency, such as the church, or by any cor-
poration or other vested interest within the state. It asserts

244 Essays on Individuality

that no individual has any right, natural or otherwise, to dis-
obey or disregard the dictates of political government.

According to Hobbes, the state not only has the right but
also the duty to suppress any opinion or expression of opinion
deemed by the ruler contrary to the security of the state. "The
actions of men proceed from their opinion and in the well gov-
erning of opinion consisteth the well governing of man." It is
the duty of the state to lay down not merely what is legal and
illegal, but also what is moral and immoral. "All subjects are
bound to obey that for divine law which is declared to be so
by the laws of the commonwealth."

In the economic sphere, moreover, Hobbes argues that the
state has complete jurisdiction over the property of its citizens.
To Hobbes' totalitarian thought, all property rights within a
state are only the result of the grant of such rights by the state,
and what the state gives, it can also take away.

The collectivism of Hobbes is an obvious precursor of mod-
ern totalitarianism. But even as Hobbes was writing, a new
movement was taking form which put renewed emphasis upon
individualism. This had its origins among religious groups
which felt that they were being persecuted by the temporal
authorities. Interestingly enough, it was the early Jesuits and
the early Calvinists who unconsciously and unwittingly laid
the foundations for the new individualism. Neither the Jesuits
nor the Calvinists were concerned with individual liberty as
such, but rather with defending the interest of their respective
churches. To this end both groups were agreed that the state
was a purely human organization and as should be subordinated
to the church, a divine organization.

In this way both the Jesuits and the Calvinists denied that
the secular state should have complete and absolute control
over its subjects. As long as the state was subordinate to and
controlled by the church, people should obey the temporal

Collectivism and Individualism 245

laws without complaint. But suppose that the laws of the
state were contrary to the laws of the church, and that the state
actually persecuted the church? In that event men should obey
God (represented by the church) rather than the king, and in
case of persecution the people had both the right and duty to
rise in rebellion, if the church so ordered. Having gone thus
far, both the Jesuits and the Calvinists went even further, af-
firming that the people have the right to rebel against a tyran-
nical ruler, even when the grounds of dispute are not theo-
logical.

By historical accident, it was the Calvinists who took the
lead in developing the doctrine of the right of subjects to rebel
against secular authority, a doctrine which later led to the re-
vival of individualism. While Calvin himself was supreme in
Geneva, many of his followers in other lands were subject to
persecution by the secular authorities, which tended to make
them inimical to the whole theory of the completely sovereign
state. In France, in the Netherlands, and in Scotland, the Cal-
vinists broke into open rebellion more than once.

Of even greater importance, historically, is the fact that
Calvinism had a strong influence upon the English Puritans
and hence upon the Puritan revolution against Charles I. At
first the orthodox Puritans were not concerned with individual-
ism. They merely wished to get rid of the bishops, curb the
king, and Calvinize the national church. But Cromwell and
many of his fellow soldiers went beyond orthodox Calvinism
in their views regarding the church. Instead of a national
church, they wanted a free association of local churches and
claimed that within limits each church should be allowed to
formulate its own doctrines. This helped to popularize the be-
lief that it was a duty to rebel against any government which
attempted to interfere with ideas, or with actions based upon
the individual's conscientious sense of what was right or wrong.
This doctrine received its most eloquent expression in the

246 Essays on Individuality

Aieopagitica of John Milton, at one time Cromwell's Latin
Secretary. In this essay Milton argued convincingly not only
for freedom of thought and expression, but also for freedom
of moral action— the right of each man to do as he pleases so
long as he does not injure his neighbors.

The revolutionary government of the Puritan Common-
wealth was not popular. After Cromwell's death it rapidly dis-
integrated, and the Stuarts were restored to the English throne.
The works of Milton were burned by the public hangman.
For a while it seemed as if absolutism would be triumphant.
But less than thirty years later (in 1688) the arbitrary actions
of James II brought on a new revolution. Thereafter England
was to be ruled by a strictly limited monarchy. There was also
a great revival of individualism, both in theory and in practice.

Just at this time John Locke brought out his little work on
Civil Government in which was incorporated a well-reasoned
and stirring plea for individualism. The ideas expounded in
this book had a profound influence upon Western Europe
and the American colonies. They were, as Thomas Jefferson
freely admitted, incorporated by him into the American
Declaration of Independence (1776), which might almost be
called a Reader's Digest version of Locke's work.

The basis of Locke's philosophy is the supremacy of Reason.
To his way of thinking, Reason (with a capital R) can give
us a solution to all human problems, moral, social, and politi-
cal. He assumes that men are essentially rational and hence
can be trained to use their reason in the conduct of their affairs.
Man must also be considered to be essentially good. Unless
corrupted by passions and prejudices, men tend to do what
reason tells them is good and avoid what reason tells them is
bad. Finally, men must be considered more or less equal. They
are not, of course, absolutely equal in their capacities and at-
tainments, but the differences between them are relatively un-

Collectivism and Individualism 247

important and are largely the result of differences in environ-
ment and upbringing.

According to Locke, men originally lived in an isolated, pre-
political state of nature. In this condition everyone possessed
a set of natural rights (life, liberty, and property) and was
governed only by a set of rational principles called natural law.
Because of the inconvenience of primitive society men eventu-
ally came together and, by means of a formal social contract,
created the political unit known as the state. To this state was
granted certain limited, but very limited, powers. These pow-
ers were limited because, when men agreed to create the state,
they retained most of their natural rights, and with these re-
tained or reserved rights the artificial state should never, under
any circumstances, interfere. In fact, the only true function of
the state is to repel foreign invaders and to punish domestic
crime. As long as a man refrains from injuring his neighbors
(thereby committing a crime), he has an absolute right to
think, to say, and to do what he pleases. It is no function of
the state to make its citizens either wise or good. Nor is it the
state's function to make them prosperous, as the general pros-
perity can best be secured by permitting complete laissez faire
in economic affairs.

At the end of the eighteenth century Jeremy Bentham pro-
mulgated his Utilitarian philosophy, which attracted a large
following, especially in England. This philosophy differed
from Locke's system in several important respects, but it was
equally fervent in defending an individualism which today
would seem extreme to many. Bentham agreed with Locke in
stressing the supremacy of reason. Bentham also agreed that
all men are basically rational, at least to the extent that they
are capable of judging what things and what measures will best
promote their own advantage. They are not only basically
equal, they are also basically homogeneous, so that irrespec-
tive of time or place they are motivated by the same emotions

248 Essays on Individuality

and desires. Bentham refused to admit that men are basically
good in the sense that they are motivated by moral principles.
He claimed that man's sole motivation is rational self-interest.
But he insisted that in a properly organized society each man,
by a sort of natural harmony, when working for his own in-
terest automatically helps to advance the interest of his fellow
citizens.

Bentham rejected Locke's ideas regarding the pre-political
state of nature and the social contract. He was not concerned
with conditions in primitive times, nor with the problem of
how states originated. He was only interested in how states
should function and how governments should act. In seeking
an answer to this problem, he rejected Locke's theories of
natural law and natural rights and all other conventional ideas
of moral obligation. He was convinced that pleasure is the only
good, and pain the only evil. From the point of view of the
individual everything and every law is good which increases
his pleasure and everything is bad which increases his pain.
From the point of view of society and the state, institutions
and laws are good when they promote the greatest happiness
(or pleasure) for the greatest number of the populace. And
institutions or laws are bad when they increase the happiness
of only a few at the expense of many.

It was on the basis of the "greatest happiness" principle that
Bentham defended individualism. The vast majority of people
are rendered unhappy when the state interferes with what they
think or say or write; hence the need for freedom of thought
and expression. Bentham was bitterly opposed to any attempt
by the state to impose morality by legal action. In the first
place it is ineffective; morality cannot be enforced. Even more
important, any attempt to enforce it will result in widespread
unhappiness and hence is evil. Punishment should be confined
to actions in which one person injures another. In like man-
ner, people are rendered unhappy when the state interferes

Collectivism and Individualism 249

with their economic activity. A man is rendered unhappy when
the state tells him what he can and cannot plant or manufac-
ture, or what kind of a job he should take. For this reason
the "greatest happiness" principle demands a rigorous "let
alone," or hissez faire, policy.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century individualism
remained the prevailing creed of nearly all the English-speak-
ing peoples. About 1870, however, a new type of collectivism
arose which rapidly became popular and was able to dominate
a large section of public opinion in the first half of the twen-
tieth century, first in England and later in the United States.

There were many different forces and political ideologies
which produced and augmented the desire for collectivism
during this period. The first important steps towards collec-
tivism were taken by men who ignored all abstract theorizing
and who were motivated either by humanitarianism or by
political expediency. Humanitarianism was a strong factor in
the adoption of many legislative measures which called for
the regulation of commerce and industry by the state. For
this reason it is not surprising that these measures were initiated
by men who were far from being radical collectivists; many
were aristocrats who felt that society has a moral duty to pro-
tect the poor, the weak, and the unfortunate. Thus some of
the earlier English "Factory Acts," which limited the employ-
ment of women and children and regulated the conditions
under which even men might labor, were sponsored by the
Earl of Shaftesbury, a staunch Tory who regarded Socialism
as the child of the devil.

Later, after the rise of organized labor to a position of politi-
cal power, humanitarianism was largely replaced by political
expediency as the main force leading towards collectivism.
This was no new phenomenon. In ancient Rome demagogues
were in the habit of securing and maintaining power by the

250 Essays on Individuality

offer of panem et ciicenses (bread and circuses) to the mob.
But there this dispensation of largesse was largely confined to
the inhabitants of the capital city. Under the modern state the
distribution is much more widespread. Practical politicians
seldom theorize about the merits or demerits of collectivism
in the abstract, but such persons are anxious to be elected or
returned to office and find it expedient to promise special
favors to large organized groups. Sometimes these favors take
the form of money subsidies (veterans' bonus, etc.). More
frequently the favors take the form of special rights and privi-
leges granted to large blocs of voters. In addition to curbing
free economic activity, some parts of this program soon tend
to contradict others. Thus many laws have been passed favor-
ing tenants at the expense of landlords (rent control); em-
ployees at the expense of employers (minimum wage); pro-
ducers at the expense of consumers (price support); and con-
sumers at the expense of producers (price control).

For the past century, however, there has been no lack of
writers who defend collectivism on abstract or theoretical
grounds. Some of these may be called Neo-Utilitarians, for
they accept many of Bentham's premises, though differing
radically as regards the conclusions to be drawn from these
premises. Bentham himself thought that the greatest happi-
ness of the greatest number (the ultimate aim of the state)
would be promoted by strict individualism. But he was careful
to deny that the individual or the minority has any "natural"
or "inalienable" right which may not be interfered with on
moral grounds. On Bentham's own principles, if at any time
it could be shown that individualism promotes unhappiness
and that socialism or even communism promotes happiness on
the part of the majority, then it would follow that individual-
ism is morally wrong and that socialism or communism is
morally right. It is the essence of Neo-Utilitarianism to claim
that individualism does lead to poverty and misery on the part

Collectivism and Individualism 251

of the "masses" (the majority) and that collectivism should
therefore be the goal of the political reformer.

The latter part of the nineteenth century also witnessed the
rise of another school of English political thought, differing
from that of Neo-Utilitarianism on many basic points but
equally favorable to collectivism. This was the Idealist school,
originating among a group of Oxford scholars (T. H. Green,
B. Bosanquet, etc.) but very strongly influenced by the teach-
ings of Hegel— so much so that the members of this group
are frequently called Neo-Hegelians. Hegel, himself, was
strongly influenced by certain phases of Rousseau's philosophy,
especially by his theory of the General Will.

The English Idealists, like the Franco-Swiss Rousseau be-
fore them, made a sharp distinction between the ephemeral
desires, wishes, and caprices of a man and his allegedly true
Willf which is his "free moral Will." Man's desires frequently
lead him astray and make him commit evil acts. His Will, how-
ever, is always basically good, as it constantly seeks to promote
the true well-being of each man and as true well-being is only
to be found in the "good" or the "worthwhile" life. True free-
dom, therefore, is not to be found in following one's animal
desires or caprices, but in doing what the rational will tells us
we ought to do. Liberty does not mean "doing what one likes."
It is rather "a positive power of doing and enjoying something
worth doing and enjoying."

From these premises the Idealists proceeded to draw strong
collectivist conclusions. Because of certain external conditions,
they argued, it is frequently impossible for the "free moral
Will" to function. In such cases it is the duty of the state to
remove these hindrances or obstacles to freedom. To Green,
a man dominated by a passion for drink is not free, but a slave
of alcohol. Hence, when the state curbs or prohibits the liquor
traffic, it is actually removing an obstacle to freedom. Green
held similar views regarding other "social evils" of his day.

252 Essays on Individuality

Thus he was convinced that the state should prohibit all gam-
bling, as an obstacle to the operation of the free moral Will.
In like manner, not only should the state abolish organized
prostitution; it should also seek to eliminate all extra-marital
sex relations, on the grounds that if the state tolerates un-
inhibited passion it is failing to remove a roadblock on the
path towards true freedom.

When Green came to deal with economic matters, it is not
surprising to find him arguing that true freedom, as he defines
it, necessitates a great deal of governmental regulation and
control. In all economic matters "the mere enabling of a man
to do as he likes is in itself no contribution to freedom." Ac-
cording to Green, men are not truly free if they are overworked
and if their wages are inadequate for the essential needs of
livelihood. Consequently, Green was in favor of regulating by
law both the hours and the compensation of industrial workers.

In the light of subsequent developments, Green's concrete
proposals for collectivist legislation now seem comparatively
mild. It must be noted, however, that many of the later Ideal-
ists became ardent advocates of Fabian Socialism on the
ground that Green's vision of "true freedom" could only be
fulfilled by a system involving the complete nationalization of
all commerce and industry.

Even the more radical of the English Idealists were moder-
ate compared with some of the continental followers of the
Hegelian school of thought. It is generally agreed that the col-
lectivism of Bismarckian Germany was a concrete embodiment
of many Hegelian ideals. Of even greater importance is the in-
fluence of the extreme, though bitterly hostile, wings of the
Hegelian movement.

Its extreme right wing led to the development of the ideol-
ogy underlying National Socialism (Nazism), Fascism, and
other similar movements. In these systems there are also many
non-Hegelian elements. But the writings of Hitler and Mus-

Collectivism and Individualism 253

solini show that most of the basic doctrines of National Social-
ism and Fascism are essentially logical developments of cer-
tain basic Hegelian ideas.

Of great influence was Hegel's belief that the state is the
highest manifestation of the Divine Spirit in Space and Time,
that "the state is the march of God in the world." Associated
with this doctrine was the idea that the dictates of the state
are higher and more important than the dictates of any abstract
system of morality or "natural" law. This in turn led to the
doctrine that the true (as opposed to the apparent) will of
each man is identical with the "general will" of the state, and
that a man is truly free only if he unreservedly accepts the dic-
tates of the state— the concrete embodiment of the General
Will.

The extreme left wing of the Hegelian movement is typified
by the doctrines of Karl Marx. There are, of course, many fea-
tures of Marxism which are of non-Hegelian origin, but the
solid core of this system, with its reliance on dialectic and its
insistence on the allegedly inevitable trend towards collectiv-
ism, is rooted in Hegelian ideology, as Marx was the first to
admit. Rousseau's and Hegel's theory of "true" freedom also
led to the defense of absolute dictatorship by the Communist
party leaders. If a man is really free, he does only what his
"true" will demands that he do; and it follows that men are
free only when they obey the dictates of those who express a
popular will which is true because it is general, and general
because it is true.

Even today practically all of the Social Democratic or Social-
ist parties of continental Europe claim to be inspired by Marx,
though they now tend to preach a rather watered-down version
of the Marxist creed. The orthodox or "fundamentalist" fol-
lowers of Marx are, of course, the Russian and Chinese Com-
munists and their adherents in other parts of the world.

254 Essays on Individuality

At the close of World War II it appeared to many that col-
lectivism in one or other of its modern aspects was bound to
engulf the world, and it is still possible that this will be the
outcome. The military collapse of Germany, Italy, and Japan
did little to stem the tide, as this only meant that the threat
of the extreme right-wing collectivism of Hitler and his allies
was replaced by the even more serious threat of extreme left-
wing collectivism embodied in the Communist movement.

Currently, however, there appears to be a turning of the tide,
which may well prove of major historical significance. For the
time being, at least, the threat of the expansion of Commu-
nism by force of arms has been checked. Of even greater im-
portance is the fact that there are now rumblings behind the
iron curtain. It is probable that the Soviet armed forces can
suppress any open rebellion, unless the Free World is willing
to supply military aid; but it is clear that there is widespread
dissatisfaction with the operation of the Communist regime.
Outside the iron curtain there was at one time widespread sym-
pathy with Communist goals, even among non-Communists.
Much of this sympathy has now disappeared. Even among the
Fabian Socialists there is a great deal of disillusionment about
the results of the nationalization of industry, as can be seen in
the New Fabian Essays published in England, and in such a
work as Democratic Socialism— A Reappraisal, by Norman
Thomas, for many years the leader of the American Socialist
movement.

It would appear that the time is now ripe for the creation
and development of a new school of individualism. If such a
school is to thrive and prove of real importance, however, it
must be founded upon a type of individualism which is both
sane and moderate. It must also be based upon a sounder
knowledge of human nature and of human history than was
characteristic of some of the earlier schools of individualism.

The older individualism was based upon the theory that
men are equal, that they are rational, and that they are good.

Collectivism and Individualism 255

The new individualism must admit that men are far from
being equal (even though it recognizes that they should be
equal before the law). It must recognize that, though men are
capable of the use of reason, man)' human actions are moti-
vated by non-rational and even downright irrational impulses.
It must realize that the idea of "original sin," or at least of
human frailty and sinfulness, is more than idle theology; that
man while in a barbarous state needed the strict discipline of
customary law to make him into a decent being; and that even
today when men are weaned away from all traditional moral
codes they are apt to revert to animal cruelty.

The new individualism must realize that in the so-called
pre-political state men did not live in isolation. In fact, in very
early times men lived in close-knit kinship groups, and appar-
ently the individual was completely subordinated to the group
as a whole. What he ate, what he wore, what he did, what he
said, what he thought were all the result of customary law im-
posed by the group. Collectivism, not individualism, character-
ized man's primitive condition.

Individualism is something which men have developed
through centuries of cultural progress. Individualism is possible
only among people who are culturally mature. Modern collec-
tivism is merely an artificial regression to barbaric practise. In
contrast to Fabian Socialism, which seeks to secure the ad-
vance of socialism slowly and gradually, the new individualists
should seek to be Fabian Individualists, striving to secure an
individualistic philosophy slowly and gradually, and only to the
extent that men prove worthy of exercising their individual
rights.

The old individualism was apt to reject all reference to tra-
dition, to the accumulated experience and wisdom of the
ages, arguing that individual reason was a sufficient guide for
the conduct of life. The new individualism must realize that,
though men should not be slaves to tradition, they would do
well to be aware of, and to profit by, what the experience of

256 Essays on Individuality

former generations has shown to be the best means of pursuing
"the good life." We shall not improve upon our ancestors by
ignoring them, but rather by building further upon the founda-
tions they laid down.

Our ultimate goal must be the complete freedom of the mu
dividual in thought, in expression of thought, and in action,
but we must realize that in the present imperfect world it is
sometimes necessary to restrict a lesser freedom in order to
secure and preserve a greater freedom. In order to preserve a
free society it is sometimes necessary to place restrictions upon
persons engaged in an organized conspiracy to abolish all free-
dom in favor of totalitarianism.

We must hold freedom of speech as .something sacred, but
it is sometimes necessary to prohibit a man from shouting
"fire" in a crowded theater. We must carefully avoid all at-
tempt to impose morality by state action. A man is truly moral
only when he freely chooses virtue in spite of his ability to
choose vice. Nevertheless, we may well act collectively to pro-
hibit the white slave traffic, the narcotics traffic, or organized
juvenile delinquency.

We cannot have true freedom when individual initiative in
the economic sphere is prohibited, and when the all-powerful
state owns and operates all or most of the means of produc-
tion and distribution. Individual freedom is impossible in the
absence of private enterprise. At the same time society must
step in to prevent fraud or the rise of monopoly. It must also
step in when any group, whether management or labor, takes
advantage of its power and seeks to exploit the other sections
of society.

Above all, we must reverence the dignity and worth of the
individual. We should fully realize that this conception is
wholly derived from spiritual and moral values. This, in turn,
means that the new individualism, if it is to rise and prosper,
can never reject or even ignore those higher values.

Index of Names

Adams, Henry, 213
Adams, James Truslow, 214
Allport, Gordon, 227
Arendt, Hannah, 80
Aristotle, 83, 88, 163, 237
Atkinson, Brooks, 121 f.

Bacon, F., 66
Bagehot, Walter, 41
Beard, Charles, 1 56 f .
Becker, Carl, 27, 149, 1561!.
Bennett, John, 109
Bentham, Jeremy, 247 f.
Berenson, Bernard, 115
Blakeslee, Albert, 132
Bodin, Jean, 243
Bohr, N., 150
Born, M., 1 50
Borrow, George, 16
Boorstin, Daniel J., 108
Bourne, Randolph, 212 f.
Burke, Edmund, 86, 90 f.

Calhoun, John C, concept of so-
ciety, 79
Capablanca, Jos6, 139 f.
Carlyle, Thomas, 52
Chase, Stuart, 77
Chaucer, 7, 148., 17

Clements, E. F., 152
Conant, James B., 230
Cowles, H. C, 152
Croce, Benedetto, 156
Cromwell, O., 245 f.

Dahl, Robert A., 1135.
Darwin, Charles, on observation

34, Origin of Species, 37 f.
Davis, Kingsley, 104
Davis, W. M., 151
De Tocqueville, Alexis, 120 f.,

209 f.
Defoe, Daniel, 16
Dewey, John, 156 f., 215
Dos Passos, John, 7, 1 3

Einstein, Albert, 24, 126, 140
Ekirch, A. A., 158 f.
Eliot, T. S., 69, 119 ff.
Engels, Friedrich, 48 f., 178

Field, Frederick Vanderbilt, 178
Ford, Guy Stanton, 216

Gibbon, Edward, 89
Glass, D. V., inf.
Gleason, H. A., 152 f.

257

258 Index of Names

Goldman, Eric, 1581".
Green, T. H., 251 f.

Hamilton, Alexander, 27 f., 94
Harvey, William, 36
Hayek, F. A., 170
Hegel, Wilhelm, 251 f.
Heraclitus, 222 f.
Hitler, Adolf, 53, 92 f., 120, 252 f.
Hobbes, Thomas, 243 f.
Holmes, Justice, 27, 108
Homans, George C., 106 f.
Hoover, Herbert, 216 f.
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 225

Jackson, Andrew, 208 f.
James, William, 68, 145
Jastrow, Joseph, 67
Jefferson, Thomas, 18 ff., 22, 24,
207

francophile influence, 94

on science, 25

Macaulay on J., 27 f.

and Locke, 246
Johnson, Samuel, 235
Jones, Tom, 16
Jung, C. G., 69

Kemp, Arthur, 6
Korzybski, Alfred, 77

Lamont, Corliss, 178
Laski, Harold J., 107 f., 119
Lindblom, Charles E., 1135.
Lindsay of Birker, Lord, 108 f.
Locke, John, 87, 94, 206, 246 f.
Lukas, Paul, 224 f.
Luther, Martin, 241

MacMaster, J. B., 207
McCormick, Anita Blaine, 171
Macaulay, Lord Thomas, 27 ff .

Machiavelli, 89

Madison, James, 33

Malthus, R., 44

Mannheim, Karl, 104

Marlowe, 17

Marshall, John, 94 f.

Marx, Karl, 42 f., 48 f., 90, 96, 253

Milton, John, 89, 246

Mises, Ludwig von, 170

Montesquieu, 94, 99

Morris, Gouverneur, 18 f., 22

Napoleon, 29, 92
Newton, 24

Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 230
Ortega y Gasset, ]os6, 30
Orwell, George, 101, 124

Pirandello, Luigi, 223
Plato, 99

Pollock, Sir Frederick, 84
Priestley, J. B., 123 f.
Proust, Marcel, 223

Randall, H. N., 27 f.

Richards, I. A., 76

Riesman, David, no

Robinson, James Harvey, 1 56 f.

Roosevelt, F. D., 30

Rousseau, Jean Jacques (see also
General Will), 82 ff., 251
his fatal achievement, 87 f ., 89 f.
and communism, 92
and climate of slavery, 93
influence on American Revolu-
tion, 93 f.

Sauer, Carl, 151, 1 54 f ., 157
Schoeck, Helmut, 6
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 45, 224
Shakespeare, 16 f.

Index of Names

2 59

Smith, Adam, 22, 171

Smollett, 16

Socrates, 74

Spencer, Herbert, 41, 48 f., 212

Spengler, Oswald, 29 f .

Stalin, 88

Tate, Allen, 75 f.
Tennyson, 45
Thomas Aquinas, 88,
Thoreau, 16, 79, 208
Tillich, Paul, 235

162 f.

Vivas, Eliseo, 74
Voigt, F. A., 76
Voltaire, 93, 158

Ward, L. F., 104
Washington, George, 1 8
Weber, Max, 211
Whitehead, A. N., 189, 216
Whittlesey, D., 155
Williams, Roger, 84
Wordsworth, William, 91

Index of Subjects

abilities, native (see also heredity,

genes), 140 ff.
acquired characters, 47 ff.
acquisitive urge, 116 ff.
actuality, historical, 147 f.
A.D.A. and Jacobin clubs, 95
adaptation, 33, 38 f., 44 f., 196 f.
adjustment, 105 f.

and sociologists, 19, 231 f.
the opposite of elbow room, 19
agitators, egalitarian, 105 f.
alcohol, differential effects, 138
alleles, effective, 56
altruism

stifling effects, 110
survival value of, 46 f .
ambition, 21 f.

America (U.S.A.), Founding
phase of, 18, 24, 33, 89,
206 ff ., 246
American Conservation move-
ment, 161 f.
American culture, and mate selec-
tion, 61
American educational process, 1 5
American educational system
and intelligent matrimonial dis-
crimination, 61
and industrial society, 31 f.

American history and individu-
ality, 205 ff.

American revolution, 25

anatomy, human differences in,
127 ff.

anthropogeography, 1 54 f .

anthropology, 117^, 154^, 164
as history, 1 54 f .

aristocrat and democrat, 18

artisans, 28

aspirations, unrealistic, 1 1 3 f .,
122 f.

astonishment, 36

authority, 25 f., 122

average individual, 131 f.

behaviorism, 225 f.

benevolence, cause of suffering to

others, 74
Big Brother, 88
Bill of Rights, 99 f., 206 ff .
biochemistry, 1 26 ff .

and evidence of individuality,

132ff.

biology, relevance to social prob-
lems, 49 f .
bohemian, 116
brain, 1 30 f .

26]

262

Index of Subjects

brainwashing, early doctrine of,

243 ff.
bureaucratic will, 23 f., 25
bureaucracy, growth of, 32 ff., 81,

211 f.

Caesar, 29
Calvinists, 244 f.
Canterbury Pilgrims, 7

Tales, 1 5 ff .
capability, directive, 142 f.
capitalism, 29

and freedom, 168 ff.

advocacy in a socialist society,
177 ff.
Catholic Church, 239 ff.
central government

growth of, 242 ff.

checks on, 99 f.
centralists economies, 105
chess, 1 39 f.
children, 26

of the common man, 59

and the "progressives," 116
choice, 142 f.

Christian doctrine and failure to
admit human differences, 145
Christianity, 88, 161

primitive, 1 5
citizenship, restore sense of, 24
Civil War, 208, 210
Civilization, defined, 1835.
Civitas Dei, 88
classification, problem of, 103 f.,

149 f.
classless society, 26 f., 60 f., 174
coercion

social, 65 f., 85 f.

and free market, 173 ff.
collective, imaginary, 109

collectivism, 237 ff.

economic, 1695., 217

of Hobbes, 244 f.
collectivist societies and equality,

collectivists, 116, 249 f.

historians as c, 158
common man, 22

deluded by guilt-ridden elite,
120 f.

his children, 59
communal property, 117
communication, 75
communism

appeal of, 32, 48, 90 f., 181,

235> 254
goal of, 42 f., 48

effects on biological evolution,

54
community, consensus in, 92

competition (see also free market),

42, 48 f., 168

complementarity, 150

complexity

of institutions, 23

of American culture today, 61
conditioning, 227 ff.
Confidential Clerk (Play), 121 ff.
conformity, 176, 212 f.

to imagined society, 14, 209 f.
connoisseurs of art, guilt ^feelings,

ngS.
conscience, defined, 67 f ., 1 20
consciousness, 13, 224 f.
conservation, movement of, 161 f.
conservatism, 165
conspicuous consumption, 109
Constitution of United States,

101, 207
consumer, 105, 174 ff.

Index of Subjects

263

Cortes, 242 f.

cowardice, 74, 120

creativity, 165 ff.

creator, 64

crime, 144, 224 f.

criticism, esthetic, in Third Reich,

120
cultural engineering, 119 ff.

and history, 1 54
culture, human fitness for survival,

5°

Darwinism, social, 42
decline, 29

of culture, 50 f .
democracy (see also General Will,
equality, egalitarianism )

tempered by aristocracy, 20

once anathema to Americans, 94

tyranny of, 89 f .

as Rousseau's monster, 98
democratic way of life, 73
democratization of culture, 104 n.
denominator, lowest common, 15

cult of, 26, 30
dental care and egalitarianism, 115
depression years, 2 1 5 ff .
determinism, 229, heredity-envi-
ronment, 141 ff.
development, future d. of man un-
predictable, 60
dictatorships, 25

and art, 120
differentiation instead of general-
ization, 157, 162
dignity, defined, 1 3
discontent, manipulated by agita-
tors, 28
distinctiveness, 125 ff.
Divine Right of Ruler, 243

division of labor, 171 ff.
documentary records, nature of,

148
dualism of individual and society,

78

ecology, 151 f.
economic growth

conditions of, 110 f.

and equality as goal, 11 3 ff .

and economic liberty, 200
economic system, rational, 41 f.
economics, 105 f.
Education Act (Britain, 1944),

inf.
educational opportunities, equal-
ity of, in f., 145
educationists, 68, 231 f.
egalitarian society, 42 f.

tradition in America, 107 f.
egalitarianism

challenged, 109

and gene combinations, 56

decline of liberalism, 1 59 ff .

inconsistent with freedom,
175 ff.

not self-limiting, 118 ff.

self-defeating, 109
ego, 222-26
elbow room, defined 19
elite, intellectual, measured, 112
empiricism, 68, 106 f.
endocrine system, 1 29 f .
English law, 14
English literature, 14
English-speaking people, 205 f.

resistance to authority, 26, 249
Enlightenment, 1 58 ff .
enterprise, free, 116

defined, 173 ff.

264

environment (see also heredity),
60

environmentalism, 141 ff.

envy

politics by, 28 f ., 1 14
envy-avoidance fear, 119 ff.
of individuality, 64
and sumptuary laws, 109
passion for equality is idealized
envy, 108, i2of.

enzymatic differences, 133 f.

Epicurean philosophy, 238

epistemological equality, 104 f.,
106

equality

defined, 108, 160

actually reached, 48

critique of , 11 3 ff ., 1 59 f ., 209 f .

no biological, 52

limited meaning of, 98, 160

leads to indispensable dictator,

99

in cognitive act only, 103

ontological, 104

and envy, 108

opportunity, 98, 107 f., inf.,
121 ff.

right to become unequal, 109
equalization of biological equip-
ment of man, 43, 48
erosion, 151
erotic appeal, 61
esthetic egalitarianism, 119 ff.
euphoria, 70
European thought, 165

concept of free enterprise in,

*74

evolution

theory of human, 37 ff., n6f.,
160 f.

Index of Subjects

participation in, 39 f., 189, 201
contemporary theory of, 50 f.,
144
exchange economy, 173 ff.
excretion patterns, 1 34
experience, utilization of, 190 f.

Fabian socialism, 252, 254

Factory Acts, 249

family, and acquisitive urge, 1 1 8

relations, 144 f.
Fascism, 96, 252 f.
Federal government, 23
Federalist papers, 94
feed-back mechanism, 50 f ., 60
feudalism, 239 f.
fitness for survival, relative concept

of, 50 f., 160 f.
Ford Foundation, 107
Foundation for American Studies,

5
Founding Fathers, 87, 94

Four Freedoms, 166

frame of reference, critique of,

149 f.

free market, 101, 168 ff.

enemies of, 174 f.

and freedom of press, 1 78 f .

freedom

defined, 13, 166, 174, 181,

194 f.

and capitalism, 168 ff.

distinct from liberty, 85

ignorance of men, 192

political and economic, 169 ff.,

256

to lose as well as to gain, 116,

174 ff.

French Revolution, 84, 92, 97

frustrations, 113

Index of Subjects

265

Fuehrer, 92
functionalism, 167

genes, 47

and enzymes, 138
gene-pool, 56 f.
genecotarian position, 143
general good, the, 23
General Will, 82 ff.

defined, 85, 90, 251 f.

and internationalism, 96

requires liquidation of parlia-
mentary opponents, 92, 253
General Motors, 23
generalizing about human be-
havior, 107
genetically rooted human prob-
lems, 143
genetics, 50 ff .
geniuses, 51 f.
geology, 148, 150 f.
goals, social, 116
god and science, 126
government

essential role of, 176 f.

self-control of, 33 f.

lines between g. and society, 81

and biological inequality of men,
144f.
"greatest happiness" principle,

248 f.
Great Man theory of history, 52 f.
great men, genie combinations,

and culture, 58
greatness, inhibition of, 58
gregariousness, 46
group activity, 233
guilt feelings, 114, 1195.

happiness, defined, 70
of individual, 18

Harvard College, 20
heredity, 51 ff.

and creation of unusual men,
55 f., 122 f.

versus environment, bogus prob-
lem, 55, 141 ff.
heterosis, 58
heterozygous, 51 f.
historians and the individual,

146 ff.
historicity, 71

and geological history, 148
history, study of

defined, 146 f., 157

the past as a whole, 149

and social science, 149 f.
human nature

defined, 163

accepted, 21 f.

differences, 1 27 ff .

reasonable identity of, 106 f.

unchanged, 24
human stature, 13
human race, genetic endowment,

53 f-
humanitarianism

as path to collectivism, 249 f .

and nature, 45

pseudo-, 87
humility, 126
hybrid-vigor, 58
hypothesis, nature of, 228 f

idiosyncracy, 17, 65

idiot-savants, 1 39 f .

imitation and social change, 191 f.

incentives, 114 f.

income distribution, 1 1 5 f .

income tax

invasion of privacy, 73, 117

tool of domination, 99

266

Index of Subjects

individual, freedom for, 41 f.

defined, 78 f.

exceptional, 55

uniqueness, 14
individualism

defined, 14, 83, 116, 126

attitudes toward, 39 f .

biological aspects, 37 ff .

history of, 244 ff .

and politics, 82 f.

and the New Deal, 217 f.

a new school of, 254 f.

threatened by General Will, 97
individuality

defined, 13, 19, 83, 125 f.,
225 f., 231 f.

defense of, 14

vs. equality, 103 ff.

the novel and, 17 f.

target of envy, 64

and private property, n6ff.

thinking, 131

how much due to heredity,
143 f.

role in human life, 143 ff.
induction, 106
industrialism, 214 f.
inegalitarian society, 114, 174 ff.
inequality

Discourse on, 93 f.

fundamental role of, 144 ff.,
174 ff.
innovation, 110
insemination, artificial, 59
instability, value of, 61 f.
intellectual process, 198 ff.
intellectualism, 185, 198, 203 f.
intervention ism, state, 87 f. 181 f.
inventor, role in history, 53, 197 ff.

IQ measurement, 64, 111 ff .
Israel, equalitarian communities,
118

Jacobins

British J. and Burke, 90 f .

clubs in America, 95 ff.
jealousy (see envy), 115
Jesuits, 244 f .
jus gentium, 238

knowledge

attitude toward, 166 f.
and civilization, 183
defined, 1 86 f .

Labor Party, "control of engage-
ments order," 170 f.

laissez faire, 41 f., 43, 169 f., 206,
247, 249

Lakher tribe, 117

language, 75 f.

last frontier theory, 28

law

rule of, 173, 242 f.
natural, 247

laws of nature, 197
and history, 158

leaders, extermination of, 54

legislature, of, by, and for the en-
vious, 29

leisure, 233

lending, custom of, 117 f.

liberalism and historians, 1 58 f.,
165

liberals and war, 213

liberties, 26

liberty

defined, 85, 192

Index of Subjects

267

civil, 85

of doing things, 198
life worth living, 27
linguistic abilities, 140 f.
lobotomy for unequals, 123 f.
luck, good and bad, concepts of in
economic growth, 110 ff.

McCarthyism, 179 f.

majority and freedom, 195 f.T 208

man, measure of, 70

man, an institution-building ani-
mal, 32 f.

man should be, 236

management and incentives, 115

manifest destiny, 208

market, private and free, see free
market

masses, the, defined, 80

mass journalism, 69, 77, 220

mass production and society, 22

mating, selective, 59 f .

medicine and individuality, 144

mediocrity, 101, 121 f., 139^

memory, attack on, 66 f .

Mendelian segregants, 52 f.

mental abilities, pattern of, 140 f.

Messianic movements and the
General Will, 92

Middle Ages, 2395.

mind-pattern and biochemistry,
i39ff.

minority groups, protected by free
market, 1 80 f .

mobility, social, 72
in Britain, 1 1 1 f .
vertical, 1 1 1 ff .

Modernism, modernity, 636., 71

money, defined, 173

monophyletic, theories, 52 f.

monopoly, 173 f.

morphine, 138

multicentered society and the in-
dividual, 80 f .

musculature and individual differ-
ences, 128 ff.

mutation pressure, 47, 56

National Education Association,

156L
Nationalism, 89, 91, 96
National socialism, 96, 169, 252 f.

and cultural planning, 119 ff.
natural selection, 42

and present existence of egotism
and altruism, 47
nature, versus humanitarianism,

44 f-
nature-nurture controversy, 141 ff.
Navaho Indians, 110
need, 106

Neo-Utilitarianism, 2 5of.
nervous system, 1 30 f .
New Deal, 30, 216 f.
New England type town, 20 f .
nihilism, 156
noblesse oblige, 20 f., 89
non-rational factors, 199 f.
normal man, 1 39 f .
normative equality, 105
nutritional differences, 134 f., 143

objectivity, 34 f.

observation, 34

ontological equality, theory of,

104 f.
open society, 61
opinion, official directors of, 14
organism

man as, 66

society as, 79

268

Index of Subjects

Organization Man, 32 ff .
organization and liberty, 202 f.
Origin of Species, 37 ff.

and intellectual history, 44 ff .

and Marxists, 43
ostracize, 87
outlaws and the General Will, 90

parliamentary institutions, 242 f.
perfectibility of man, 158, 161
persona, 63, 222
personality, 63 f.

defined, 67

attacked today, 65 f.

and individuality, 63 f., 162 f.

and language, 78
pharmacological reactions, differ-
ences in, 135 ff .
phenomena, identity of, 104 f.
Philosophies, the French, 1 57 f .
physics, 24

mathematical, 150
Physiocrats, 91 f.
planning, social, 1 56 ff .

central, 171 f.
plant ecology, 1 51 ff.
Pleistocene geology, 1 50 ff .
polis, 2 37 f .
politics

defined, 82

political power, 177
politics by bribery, 249 f .
population, density and freedom,

28 f.
potentialities

hereditary, 51 f., 60, 141 ff.

human, 106, 143, 161
power, political

absolute, 243 f.

to coerce, 176 ff.

diffused, 99 ff .
predictability, 192 f.
pressures, 13
preventive war, 9 3
primitive people

and history, 151

and collectivism, 255

property and individuality,
117 f.
privacy, 72 f., n6ff.
private, content of, 173
productivity, increase of and theo-
ries of doom, 30
profile of native abilities, 140 f.
profits, and the will of the ma-
jority, 98
progress

cultural and superior men, 55 f.

evolutionary, defined, 51

and humanitarianism, 41
progressives, inconsistency of, 116
propaganda

freedom of, 177 ff.

subversive, 179
property, lack of, 118
property, private

and individuality, 116 ff., 194 f.

security of, 28 f.
protest, social, literature of, 78
psychology, 139, 223 ff., 227
Puritans, 245 f.

Race problems, 145
reactionary, defined, 87
reality, historical, 67
reason, 246 f.

rebellion, moral right of, 245 f.
redemption, 161
redistribution, 113 f., 218, 250

Index of Subjects

269

Reformation, 89, 242

relativism, 149 f., 156 flF., 159,

200 f.
religious, 68

concept of personal, 65

society, 89
Renaissance, English, 17
research, by solitary individual, 34
resentment, aggressive, 111 f.
retrogression, cultural (see also de-
cline)

loss of selective mating and r.,
60
revolt of the masses, 30, 217
revolutions and the General Will,

96 f.
rivalry, 92

roles, public and private, 72
Roman Catholics, 100
rules (see coercion, social)

of the game, 176

of society vs. state, 86 f .
Russia, 96 f., 175

Czarist, 169

sacredness of personality, 65
science

method of, 149 f.

distortion of facts by, 1 50
scientism, 126, 150, 166 f., 188,

227, 230 f.
scientistic egalitarianism, 103 f.,

110
security, 217
segregants, 52
self, 72

and conscience, 68
self-government, 30, 32
self-interest, 21 f.

rational, 248 f.
self-knowledge, 73 flE.

servitude, 13

instrumental, 65
sex cells, 59
sex physiology, 132
shame, lack of, 13
simple-mindedness, creative, 64
sin, 66

original, 255
single-party system, 91 f.
slavery, 166

small group research, 106 f.
"socially useful," 231
social change, 190 ff., 200 f.

for its own sake, 71 f.

and mate selection, 60 f .
social contract, 83 ff., 248 f.

not to be confused with General
Will, 88
social control, no, 204

by reformers, 109
social scientists as agitators, 105
social science vs. history, 146 ff.,

154-58
social security, 87
socialists, educational philosophy

of, 122 f.
socialize, urge to, 5
society, defined, 80, 87

of equals, 113

myth of "the whole s.," 109 f.,
120, 209 f., 224 f.
society

and state, 87

structure, 190

understood by men, 21 f.
sociology, limits of, 103 f.

applied vs. pure, 104
soils as open systems, 153
Sophists, 156
sovereign, the, 86
sovereignty, 91 f., 243 f.

27°

Index of Subjects

spatio-temporal order and lan-
guage, 77
specialization, 22 f.
state, 207, 243 f.

moral agent through prohibi-
tions, 251 f.

society without s., 43
statebuilding, aims of, 18 f.
statism (see also collectivism),
217, 239, 243 ff.

being reactionary, 87
statistics, 104'f.
status

and economy, 174

idea of as a psychic asset, 71 ff.
stomach, 127 f.
stratification, social, 20, 26, 61

value of, ii4f.
style, modern, 77 f.
"sublime science," 18 f., 24
suffrage, universal leading to des-
potism, 27 ff.
Supreme Court, 84
survival values, 46 ff.
symposium, 5

taboo, 117 f.

talent, 52

Tammany Hall, 95

taste, sense of, 131 f.

taxes (see also income tax), 23

instrument of envy, 30 f .
taxonomy, 155
team-research, futile, 34, 106 f.,

233
technology, 21

teenager's ego, 105 f.

Third Reich, 119 f.

Time, historical, 151

totalitarianism (see also General

Will, collectivism )

and economics, 169 ff.

and egalitarianism, 120

philosophy of, 80

roots of modern, 93, 244 f.
traditional virtues, survival value

of, 46 f.
traitors to the body politic, 90

"undemocratic," 68
unique, the, 146 ff.
uniqueness

and classification in science,

103 ff., 1505., 154
of history "undemocratic,"
157 f.
United Auto Workers, 2 3
United States (see also America
and American)
not intended to be a democracy,
100

vanity, 21 f.

vegetation and man, 152^

Virginia county governments,

20 f.
vocabulary of political freedom,

24 f.
Volksgemeinschaft, 120
voluntary cooperative actions,

171 ff.
contraction of, 87
volonre generate, 82 ff .
vox populi, vox dei, 88
Voyage of the Beagle, 34

Wealth, redistribution, 30 f.
welfare state, 106, 122 f.
women, special attitude toward,

i5f.
World War I, 212
World War II, 5, 219

Date Due

Due

Returned

Due

Returned

J y fflfcwRBBp**

MAY 15 WWapr 181989

1

Essays on individuality, main
301 15M864eC2

3 15b5 0327D 02S3

JW . AS"

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